With the extension of wireless technology, vehicular ad hoc networks provide important services for the dissemination of general data and emergency warnings. However, since, the vehicle topology frequently changes from a dense to a sparse network depending on the speed of the moving vehicles and the time of day, vehicular ad hoc networks require a protocol that can facilitate the efficient and reliable dissemination of emergency messages in a highly mobile environment under dense or intermittent vehicular connectivity. Therefore, this paper proposes a new vehicular broadcast protocol, called BL-CAST, that can operate effectively in both dense and sparse network scenarios. As a low overhead multi-hop broadcast protocol, BL-CAST does not rely on the periodic exchange of beacons for updating location information. Instead, the location information of a vehicle is included in a broadcast message to identify the last rebroadcasting vehicle in an intermittently connected network. Simulation results show that BL-CAST outperforms the DV-CAST protocol in terms of the end-to-end delay, message delivery ratio and network overhead.