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NEW York City emergency management officials have apologized for a confusing flood warning issued in Spanish by drones flying overhead in some neighborhoods.
City officials had touted the high-tech message-delivery devices ahead of expected flash flooding on Tuesday.
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But when the video of a drone delivering the warning in English and Spanish was shared widely on social media, users quickly mocked the pronunciation of the Spanish version.
This version was supposed to be crucial and delivered to a city where roughly a quarter of all residents speak the language at home.
“How is THAT the Spanish version? It’s almost incomprehensible,” one user posted on X.
“Any Spanish-speaking NYer would do better,” they continued.
“The city couldn’t find a single person who spoke Spanish to deliver this alert?” another X user wrote.
“It’s unfortunate because it sounds like a literal Google translation,” added another.
Zach Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner, acknowledged on X that the muddled translation “shouldn’t have happened.”
He also promised that he and other officials were working to “make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
In a follow-up post, he provided the full text of the message as written in Spanish and explained that the problem was in the recording of the message, not the translation itself.
Iscol’s agency has said the message was computer-generated and went out in historically flood-prone areas in four of the city’s five boroughs, excluding Manhattan.
Flash floods have been deadly for New Yorkers living in basement apartments, which can quickly fill up with water.
Eleven people drowned in these types of homes in 2021 as the remnants of Hurricane Ida drenched the city.
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