Hundreds of non-English-speaking seafood industry workers endured an arduous claims process in south Mobile County — an area heavily populated by immigrants from Southeast Asia — because of what one volunteer group identified as a lack of translators.
Oil spill claims czar Ken Feinberg, who takes the reins from BP today, promised that he would smooth out the process for non-English-speakers in Bayou La Batre.
Feinberg said he would have interpreters at claims centers and provide forms in several different languages.
When BP was running the claims process, many in the Bayou who speak Vietnamese or Khmer exclusively had trouble with the language barrier, according to the Boat People SOS organization, a nonprofit assisting those in local Southeast Asian communities collect claims.
The trouble began as soon as BP launched the claims process, according to Grace M. Sciré, the group’s regional director.
The toll-free phone number to file a claim was only offered in English.
“They started to come in and say that we can’t file for a claim number because it’s in English, and we don’t understand what they’re asking us,” Sciré said. “We started making the calls for them.”
BP spokesman Ray Melick said that, through a contractor, the company hired a Vietnamese interpreter to work at the claims center in Bayou La Batre. BP also had translators who spoke Spanish, Khmer, Laotian and French, Melick said.
But at least one of the translators, Sciré said, only knew a few Vietnamese words. BP said their translators were hired through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“He could not carry a conversation,” said Vinh Tran, who is volunteering as a translator for Boat People SOS. “Listening might be another issue, but the responding part was not there.”
Tran helped provide translation for an oil spill-related panel discussion at Alma Bryant High School on Thursday and for a meeting with Feinberg at the Bayou La Batre Community Center on Saturday.
"We’re hoping that, going forward, Mr. Feinberg would use bilingual adjusters instead of interpreters,” Sciré said.
This weekend, even after Feinberg directly addressed her questions at the Bayou La Batre meeting, she said she remained skeptical.
“They’re going to go into an office that they’ve gone into before, where they’ve had no success ... in terms of adequate translation assistance,” Sciré said. “And now they have to do this whole other process. First of all, they’re going to know that it’s useless because they had to come to us the first time. So they’re probably going to come to us again.”
Johnny Nguyen, vice president of operations of SPS Inc., an accounting firm in Mobile helping with claims in Bayou La Batre, said the process was a struggle for those who speak English as well.
Still, he said, “there was just not adequate representation from BP’s side” with translations. And that made the process difficult for many workers because “they were not understanding what is asked of them.”
Sciré said the nonprofit group volunteered interpretation services and provided headsets at the meetings, something BP did not offer.
Melick disagreed.
“I’m not going to say there was an interpreter at every meeting, but whenever they were requested, they were,” Melick said — though he could not say how many requests had been made since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.
“We feel really good about being aware of different language barriers.”