Mayor Tom Tate today launched a series of multilingual videos to assist the Gold Coast’s culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) community to prepare for emergencies and disasters.
“The official summer storm season is not yet over for this year so we can’t be complacent. We’re all vulnerable to the risks of storms, flooding and bushfires and research shows people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities are especially vulnerable if they cannot access or understand the information provided, particularly if they find themselves in a new environment,” Councillor Tate said.
“We know from years of experience that there are simple steps we can take to keep ourselves, our families, pets and properties safe and we want all residents to have access to this information in order to be as prepared as possible if our city was to face a disaster event.
“I’m proud to launch a series of videos we’ve produced to address a gap in disaster preparedness information for our CALD community. These resources are another important step towards creating a resilient community.
Cr Tate said that 27.9 percent of the city’s residents were born overseas and over 50,000 residents spoke a language other than English at home. Of these, 5139 people reported speaking English not well or not at all.
“We also have over 800,000 international visitors travel to our city each year and it’s important they have access to information to help them stay safe.”
Based on Census information about languages spoken by newly arrived migrants, the videos were produced in Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, Persian and Arabic.
“Of course, we all hope we’ll never need to use an emergency kit or to evacuate our homes, but extreme weather is part of our lives and as a community, our best protection is to be prepared.”
Community at Home guides are also available in the same languages spoken in the videos, as well as Bosnian, Hungarian and Spanish. The resources will be used by organisations like the Multicultural Communities Council Gold Coast, Multicultural Families Organisation, The Migrant Centre and local community groups to help their clients to prepare their families and properties throughout the year.
The videos and guides are available at: cityofgoldcoast.com.au/otherlanguages
For more information on disaster preparedness visit: cityofgoldcoast.com.au/getready
