More needs to be done to prepare state residents who don't speak English to respond to a disaster, advocates and members of some ethnic communities say.

Yuk Pang Law, who heads Hawai'i Immigrant Services, which specializes in aiding ethnic communities, said such a push is badly needed.

When a disaster does arise, "I don't think they're well-informed about what to do and I don't know who is supposed to inform them," Law said. "They don't speak English and when they turn on the TV, they don't even know what's going on because they only see pictures."

Manny Sound, former president of Micronesians United and former lieutenant governor of Chuuk, agreed.

"I was thinking about things like relevant information for preparedness," he said. "If the island is going to be hit by a storm, what are the steps a family must take?"

According to the Hawai'i Data Book 2004, 302,125 members of the island's population 5 years old and over, or 26.6 percent, speak a language other than English at home. Less than half of them, 143,505 — or 12.65 percent of those 5 and over — marked themselves off as speaking English "less than very well."

Some steps have been taken to meet the need, and others are in the works.

Ahm Sepety, a Pohnpeian native, has a 72-hour emergency kit that includes beans, tuna and other canned goods, flashlights, water, eyeglasses and important papers sealed in Zip Loc bags set aside in his home at Palolo Valley Homes.

Sepety learned how to put a kit together at a disaster preparedness workshop organized by Mary Matayoshi of the Volunteer Resource Center several years ago for those who speak Samoan and various Micronesian languages at home. Sepety said besides making the box for his own family of six, he trained about 15 other Pohnpeian families to do so.

Sepety said there needs to be more of the same programs. "I think we need more help," he said.

Matayoshi said she was able to provide the program through money made available by O'ahu Civil Defense but she has not been able to tap that resource since. But she suggested that non-English-speaking immigrants can take the initiative and encourage their churches, temples or other ethnic-based community organizations to set up workshops with either Civil Defense or the American Red Cross.

Civil Defense and Red Cross officials said they would welcome groups seeking help on disaster preparedness, noting they have brochures published in a number of different languages.

John Cummings III, a spokesman for O'ahu Civil Defense, said his agency is doing what it can to ensure it can get the word out to the non-English speaking communities — both before the next disaster occurs and when it hits.

A key partner in that effort is KNDI radio 1270 AM, which carries programs in no less than 11 languages.

While there's a clearly spelled- out network of stations that work with Civil Defense during an emergency, Cummings said, "I'd like to see if we can work KNDI into being the primary place for folks to listen for multilingual emergency information."

During the tsunami evacuation of 1994, Cummings said, inter-preters were brought into Civil Defense headquarters, where they broadcast instructions on the main radio network. But the situation was not ideal, with more than a third of the airtime devoted to translations, she said.

KNDI owner Leona Jona said being able to help immigrant communities in a disaster or crisis is one of the key reasons she has continued to operate her station.

"I worry about it myself," Jona said. "They would listen more if we could send out the warning messages in their own languages. They would listen to it more than if it was said just in English. I think we could save quite a (few) lives. I think these people need just a little bit more attention than the regular population."

Cummings said emergency public service announcements, explaining to people what to do during disaster situations, have been recorded in a variety of languages including Chinese, Japanese, Samoan, Korean, Ilocano and Tagalog, so that they can run when the time comes.

Civil Defense is trying to line up people who can speak other dialects to record similar messages, Cummings said.

Additionally, Civil Defense is trying to set aside funding in its upcoming budget to have public service announcements and basic preparedness programs aired in various languages on KNDI in the near future, he said.

Those programs, he said, would educate immigrant families on pre-disaster planning, including being familiar with the definitions of hurricane and tsunami watches and warnings

Tin Myaing Thein, executive director of the Pacific Gateway Center, said informing immigrants about emergency preparedness was a major topic at a staff retreat last week.

Staff members, who provide services to people speaking 20 to 30 different languages, have been instructed to reach into their communities and talk to people about what they can do.

Non-English-speaking immigrants approached staff members after seeing footage of the recent flooding in the Gulf Coast region and asked if the same thing could happen here, Thein said.

They were then told — or reminded — what happened during Hurricane Iniki and Hurricane Iwa.

"They have to be prepared," Thein said.

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.