WWL

WWL’s role in the Katrina crisis was both practical and consequential: its broadcasts connected isolated residents and hospital staff to a fast-moving emergency, but the same airwaves also carried alarming claims that were unverified or later disputed. The station’s marathon coverage helped shape what people believed about conditions across New Orleans, how they judged the risks of evacuation, and, years afterward, how they responded to the prosecution of three Memorial Medical Center caregivers.

A generator-powered lifeline

As the storm’s aftermath unfolded, some intensive-care nurses at Memorial Medical Center tuned radios on their computer carts to WWL, a 50,000-watt talk station broadcasting on generator power. In a hospital preparing for rising floodwaters and possible power failure, the broadcasts brought news from beyond the building at a time when ordinary communications and reliable information were scarce.

That connection could be immediate and personal. A caller named Freddy described being trapped in an attic in the Gentilly neighborhood, near Lake Pontchartrain, with four other people, including a baby. About nine feet of water surrounded the house. The group had made a hole through the roof and spent four hours trying to signal a helicopter with candles, a lantern, and a flashlight. When the host asked whether the water was still rising, Freddy said that it was. His call turned a remote report of flooding into a specific account of people waiting for rescue.

Other callers tried to make sense of water remaining in the streets even as drainage pumps could be heard operating. WWL gave such observations a public audience, but the broadcast could not necessarily explain what callers were witnessing. The gap between reports and explanations became a defining feature of the station’s coverage: it relayed information quickly, in circumstances where both the facts on the ground and the ability to verify them were changing.

Rumor, danger, and evacuation

An early and particularly consequential broadcast error concerned martial law. The president of neighboring Jefferson Parish announced on the air that martial law had been declared, and WWL repeated the message. It had not, in fact, been declared in the disaster zone. The claim gave a false official-sounding frame to the emergency, while reports of looting and disorder added to fears about what awaited people outside hospitals and shelters.

As conditions worsened, a caller complained of looting, and a host amplified her account and endorsed a severe response. The station also carried increasingly dramatic descriptions of danger. Its coverage included rumors of violence at the New Orleans Superdome, some attributed to people said to be leaving the building. A New Orleans police captain called in to say that those reports were false. At the same time, Governor Kathleen Blanco said that roughly 20,000 people were stranded at the Superdome, without power and facing deteriorating sanitary conditions, and that the building needed to be evacuated, especially for people with medical needs. The distinction mattered: the broadcasts mixed disputed reports with a confirmed humanitarian emergency, and listeners had to judge them under pressure.

That mixture affected decisions at Memorial. As families arrived by boat seeking food and help, hospital staff planned to provide food and direct them to the Superdome, described as a shelter of last resort, partly on the expectation that people could be evacuated there more quickly. Yet WWL was also reporting conditions there as abysmal, including people trying to flee through floodwaters. The Superdome was more than two miles away. The advice therefore carried a sharp contradiction: the proposed destination was also the place the station’s own coverage portrayed as increasingly unsafe. Meanwhile, a request to expedite Memorial’s evacuation had not secured a confirmed promise of additional helicopters; the hoped-for support and the help actually committed remained uncertain.

A marathon broadcast and a citywide picture

During the crisis, WWL’s ad-free call-in coverage extended beyond its own audience, with material relayed to AM and FM stations across southeast Louisiana. Dave Cohen denounced looting and reported that state police had sent tactical teams, while callers and guests described a city in distress. The station’s makeshift studio was in the basement of an emergency operations center near New Orleans, where officials and civilians called in or appeared in person. The broadcast assembled fragments from different locations into a continuous account of a citywide emergency.

Some of that account relied on hearsay and vivid descriptions rather than verified observation. Oliver Thomas, then president of the New Orleans City Council, compared the people remaining in the city to figures from a zombie film and described them as stressed, hungry, and thirsty; he also said armed reinforcements had been requested. Another guest described organized groups committing break-ins. These claims helped communicate fear and desperation, but they also risked turning people stranded in the city into a threatening mass. The broadcast’s power came partly from its immediacy; that same immediacy made the boundary between documented conditions and circulating rumor especially important.

From emergency reporting to political advocacy

WWL’s public influence continued after the immediate crisis. On July 17, 2007, its popular talk-radio host Garland Robinette urged listeners to gather at a public rally in support of Anna Pou. He called for the attorney general and district attorney to drop the case. Four days earlier, Charles Foti had appeared on Robinette’s Think Tank program, where Robinette accused him of driving doctors and nurses out of the state. Foti hung up, and Robinette’s response became an emotional denunciation of what he saw as the treatment of Pou and the two nurses.

Robinette had been a relative newcomer to radio before Katrina, but the disaster had shown him how broadcasting could mobilize listeners around an issue. He believed that if people understood how a problem might affect them, they would respond. He therefore turned the station’s reach toward defending Pou, Landry, and Budo, whom he regarded as caregivers being punished for trying to save lives. Hundreds gathered at the rally, some carrying signs supporting the caregivers or criticizing Foti. WWL was no longer simply relaying crisis information: through Robinette, it became a platform for public pressure on the officials pursuing the case.

Record and significance

The broadcasts preserved the unstable information environment in which residents, hospital workers, and officials made decisions. They recorded concrete pleas for rescue, official statements about evacuation, and claims that were disputed even as they circulated. Their significance lies not in providing a single authoritative account of the disaster, but in showing how urgent reporting, rumor, and institutional announcements could coexist on the same airwaves—and how listeners were left to distinguish among them while events were still unfolding.

The station’s archive also became part of the historical reconstruction. Research associate Rebecca Rabinowitz parsed hours of WWL broadcasts moment by moment, allowing the book to recover the sequence and changing tenor of reports. That work underscores WWL’s double place in the story: it was an emergency communications channel heard inside the hospital and across the region, and it was a lasting record through which later readers could examine how public understanding of the crisis was formed.