More than a million Arizonans are hard of hearing and of that an estimated 20,000-to-30,000 use American Sign Language as their primary language. During an emergency, communication is vital. And there’s a small group of people who ensure access to information.

Vicky Bond is with the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing. She helped create the Emergency Response Interpreter Credentialing program, or ERIC, which trains and certifies ASL interpreters to sign during an emergency.

"So, in our training we specifically went into the terminology that emergency responders use, so things like the incident command system that they’re all using the national incident management system, as well as things specific to hazards in our area," Bond said.

Like wildfires, floods or the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Facility. And that terminology, said Bond, is incredibly complex and specific to the nuclear sciences.

"There aren’t necessarily signs for all of these concepts and so we have to find a way to convey them and describe them in a manner that makes sense to the people that we’re interpreting for," Bond said.

It took Bond about a year to create the curriculum for ERIC. They began certifying interpreters last November.