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
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"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."