WWL Radio

WWL Radio was a New Orleans talk-radio station whose broadcasts became a consequential source of information during Hurricane Katrina. Operating on generator power, it carried callers’ accounts of rising floodwater and people awaiting rescue alongside reports that could heighten fear or blur the line between verified fact and rumor. Heard inside hospitals and throughout the region, the station’s marathon coverage helped make the crisis outside the city’s medical centers immediate to staff and listeners, while its surviving recordings later supplied a detailed record of what was said on air.

Station and Emergency Broadcasts

Described in the book as a popular 50,000-watt talk station, WWL Radio continued broadcasting on generator power after the storm disrupted ordinary services. Its programs took on added importance as residents sought explanations for what was happening around them and practical information about danger and rescue. The broadcasts included both official announcements and calls from people describing their own circumstances; those accounts did not always come with enough information for listeners to assess their accuracy.

One consequential error concerned martial law. The president of neighboring Jefferson Parish announced on air that it had been declared, and WWL Radio repeated the announcement. It had not, in fact, been declared in the disaster zone. The distinction mattered in an atmosphere already marked by fear: the claim presented an exceptional transfer of police powers as an established condition, lending apparent authority to a mistaken description of events.

Other exchanges revealed how incomplete the available information could be. A caller complained about looting without explaining how she knew what was happening, and the host amplified the accusation and its associated demand for force. In another call, a resident questioned why homes remained flooded when he could hear drainage pumps operating nearby. The host had no answer. The sequence placed an unanswered, concrete observation beside reports that offered certainty without a clearly established basis.

Callers Describe the Flood

The broadcasts also carried direct accounts from people cut off by floodwater. In one early-morning call, a man named Freddy said he was in the attic of his home in the Gentilly neighborhood, near Lake Pontchartrain, surrounded by about nine feet of water. Four other people were with him, including a baby. They had made an opening through the roof and spent four hours trying to attract a helicopter with candles, a lantern, and a flashlight. Asked whether the water was still rising, he said that it was.

The account connected the citywide emergency to a particular household’s predicament: people isolated above floodwater, trying to make themselves visible to rescuers while the water continued to rise. Gentilly, an area that had flooded badly in the 1927 storm, lay several miles northeast of Memorial Medical Center. For hospital listeners, the call made the surrounding disaster more than a distant report; it described conditions in a nearby part of the city while rescue remained uncertain.

As the broadcasts continued, the station also relayed claims about disorder. Reports included alleged hostage situations and prison breaks, as well as assertions about armed looters taking postal vehicles. One deputy sheriff described what might have been a shark near a hotel, then acknowledged that it could instead have been debris resembling a fin. The uncertainty in that account was explicit, but the extraordinary image sat within a larger stream of alarming reports. On the same broadcast, Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard appealed for more armed military police and portrayed deprivation as a source of growing anger and violence. The material conveyed real distress and danger, but it also showed how quickly uncertain incidents could accumulate into an atmosphere of generalized threat.

The Signal Inside Memorial

WWL Radio’s reach extended into Memorial Medical Center. During the early hours of the emergency, some intensive-care nurses kept radios on their computer carts and tuned in. Their patients depended on machines for breathing, monitoring, and medication, while the nurses were working amid the hospital’s own deteriorating conditions. The reports therefore reached listeners who were simultaneously caring for critically ill patients and trying to understand what awaited outside.

The station’s accounts also entered the hospital’s decisions about people arriving for help. As helicopters transporting people from the hospital complex drew attention, others waded through water to seek shelter. A stabbing victim who reached the emergency-room ramp needed urgent air transport; around a dozen people later arrived by boat with children, needing food and assistance. Hospital staff faced pressure to secure entrances as the surrounding community sought refuge. A Tenet report described the proposed response: give families food, tell them that no further patients were being evacuated, and direct them toward the New Orleans Superdome. That advice was questionable in light of WWL Radio reports that conditions there were abysmal and that people were trying to flee. The broadcasts did not determine the hospital’s actions, but they formed part of the information environment in which staff considered what to tell people outside.

On Wednesday, LifeCare staff heard further reports on a radio in their corridor. The broadcasts’ succession of claims about violence and breakdown added to the fears surrounding a difficult evacuation. In a separate call-in program, host Dave Cohen denounced looting and relayed reports of state police deployments and a call for a full evacuation of New Orleans. Taken together, the broadcasts moved between reports of immediate public danger and sweeping descriptions of the city’s condition, with listeners inside the hospital receiving them in the middle of their own emergency.

Record, Reach, and Limits

The book treats WWL Radio not only as a voice heard during the crisis but also as an archival source. The station furnished digital audio of its broadcasts, which the author and research associate Rebecca Rabinowitz transcribed. Those transcripts underpin radio excerpts in the book from August 29 through September 1, 2005. A cited dissertation on radio’s role during Katrina likewise examined WWL Radio and United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans as a case study.

That record preserves a mixture of firsthand calls, official statements, host commentary, and uncertain reports. Its value lies partly in the contrasts it makes audible: a resident’s puzzlement about functioning pumps beside unexplained water in a house; a caller’s anxious description of a family surrounded by floodwater; and a mistaken martial-law announcement repeated as fact. The station’s coverage was therefore both a practical channel through which people encountered the disaster and evidence of how limited, conflicting information could circulate during it. The book’s use of the recordings retains that tension rather than treating every broadcast report as equally verified.