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Radio captures the horror, exhaustion ( OT )
Radio captures the horror, exhaustion
By Dave Walker TV columnist http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakin...08.html#075290 The exasperation, sadness, shock and exhaustion in Dave Cohen's voice said more than the words he was saying, and they were bad enough. This was midday Wednesday, and Cohen was manning the microphone at WWL AM 870, the New Orleans news-talk station that was providing a lifeline of information to thousands of evacuees around the region, one of them me. The hole in the levee allowing Lake Pontchartrain to dump into unflooded portions of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish had not been mended. The "bowl effect" was going to be achieved, with the city filling with water, maybe all the way to the brim created by the walls built to protect it. Cohen sounded defeated by the implications. Toxic contamination, structural wasting by weeks of submersion, the horrific liquid funk that would harbor insects, disease, more death. The possibility that the city itself would be uninhabitable, even once the breach was blocked and the water was drained and the destroyed trees and houses and corpses cleaned up and the looters at last in retreat, seemed utterly real and likely to Cohen, and, no doubt, many of his listeners. That WWL had stayed on the air at all was a dramatic tale that will be told here in fuller detail in later weeks and, I'm sure, years. WWL abandoned its downtown cluster of studios overlooking the Louisiana Superdome after Hurricane Katrina blew out all of the office windows. Listeners who heard host Garland Robinette's narration of the live, on-the-air retreat farther inside the building as Katrina pounded away, heard horrible/wonderful broadcasting - a horror to listen to, but a wonder, too. Literally blown out, a broadcast skeleton crew moved to the basement of the Jefferson Parish emergency operations center, according to a spokesman for Entercom Communications, the Pennsylvania-based parent company to WWL and several other New Orleans radio stations. As last-gasp efforts were underway to remove the thousands of people still trapped in New Orleans on Wednesday, Entercom was making plans to remove its makeshift studio all the way to Baton Rouge, which has become the local media staging area for post-Katrina coverage. With cable news carrying pictures of the USS Bataan steaming into position to provide a command center for the relief effort, it was hard not to frame the day in Biblical context. Wednesday began with TV and radio coverage of live prayers by the governor and a collection of holy men. By the time New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas joined Cohen and Chris Miller on WWL in mid-afternoon, the things he'd seen in the streets were going to be literally unforgettable. He'd seen a body, probably many, in the water on a reconnaissance boat trip. "I still see that body," he said. "I see his position. I see the color of the clothes he had on." He'd seen looters, too, and asked anybody with ulterior intentions "to get on your knees and pray for intervention." He'd seen hell where a kind of heaven should be. He'd heard references to Sodom and Gomorrah. "Maybe God's going to cleanse us," said Thomas. No place is that wicked. TV columnist Dave Walker can be reached at . "You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people," he added. "You can go overseas with the military, but you can't get them down here." |
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