A Lifeline Sent by Airwave

Deke “the Big Chief” Bellavia, a sportscaster on WWL-AM, is among the world’s leading authorities on high school football in southeast Louisiana. He has a rolling, syrupy accent and an enormous girth, which he is not too shy to mention on the air.

He did not expect to find himself -- as he did last week -- instructing a dehydrated listener to punch a hole in a can of corn and suck out the liquid. Or soothing a woman who called from her cellphone while wading through water that had bodies in it. This was not what he was hired to do.

“You find a way to get through it because the people need you,” Bellavia said.

After Hurricane Katrina, as modern forms of communications failed one by one in New Orleans, one technology functioned, and that was radio.

Working out of a fluorescent-lighted studio in Baton Rouge, a collection of personalities from New Orleans radio stations -- sportscasters, rock jocks, Christian broadcasters, and soft rock and smooth-talk R&B; talent -- has served as the slender connection between stranded people and the outside world.

It was a talk-radio host, Garland Robinette, who, three days after Katrina, recorded the interview with New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin that sounded the city’s distress like a foghorn. It was radio that recorded the locations of hundreds of people who used the fading batteries of their cellphones to call the station. These days, from morning to night, radio broadcasts survivors as they look for lost and separated family members.

“In a crisis, you fall back to what you know. You fall back to the very basics,” said Kevin Duplantis, chief engineer for WWL, in normal times a conservative talk-radio station. “And radio is very simple. Turn it on, turn up the volume, and someone is talking to you. You’re attached to that voice. You’re looking to that voice as your guide out.”

On Aug. 29, when the storm made landfall, satellite dishes welded to the rooftops in New Orleans broke loose and crashed into one another, cracking into pieces. The only media outlet still broadcasting live from the city was WWL, and in its offices, programming and operations manager Diane Newman, 48, heard the studio windows -- which had been boarded up -- explode one by one.

She had Robinette on the air at that moment, and walked him down the hallway holding a microphone in front of him, as if he were a hospital patient attached to an IV. Robinette, 62, had broken into broadcast journalism while working as a janitor at a small radio station; he shook off his Cajun accent and, with his wedge of dark hair, became an icon in New Orleans.

By 6 the next morning, a levee had broken, and Newman had orders to evacuate to Baton Rouge, 80 miles away. Those employees who could still drive out left at dawn, and the last few who remained were evacuated by helicopter. The helicopter had been chartered by WWL’s fiercest competitor, Clear Channel Communications Inc., to pick up several of its own employees.

It was the beginning of an unusual partnership. That same day, Clear Channel and WWL’s parent company, Entercom Communications Corp., temporarily combined their operations; 18 stations would broadcast as one. Clear Channel would benefit from WWL’s formidable news operation, and Entercom would have access to Clear Channel’s studios.

The new venture -- the United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans -- went on the air at dawn Aug. 31, two days after the hurricane.

It seemed like an easy decision to Dick Lewis, Clear Channel’s regional vice president. Lewis, 54, can identify the precise moment when he decided to get into radio. He was 17, in the car with his parents, driving through a terrible storm near Broken Bow, Okla.

It was the middle of the night. As the wind and hail grew stronger, Lewis recalls, his mother told the kids to get down between the car’s seats. Then the tornado touched down on them and the car started “bouncing like a basketball.”

What Lewis remembers is that the radio in the car, tuned to WKY-AM in Oklahoma City, kept working. For 20 minutes -- a period that felt like a lifetime -- “it was the radio that gave us our sense of calmness, our touch with the outside world,” he said.

He got into radio for that reason, although most of his time is spent, he says, on “routine stuff.”

“We provide entertainment to fill up the time,” he said. “All we’re doing is filling up the time, to be here until something of significant magnitude happens.”

In the beige-carpeted offices of Clear Channel Communications in Baton Rouge, posters declare a corporate mantra: “Clear Channel Communications. Make Budget. Beat Market.” Last week, after WWL relocated there, someone crossed out the last two sentences, and wrote this in with a red marker: “Help Humanity.”

Hold lights blinked on the studio phone for three days as listeners called in to tell the world about the terrible things that were happening to them.

Their minds fogged with fear, they asked radio hosts how they should get to their roofs. The answer: Climb out on the windowsill. Hand the children up. DJs gave instructions on how to take a wooden door off its hinges so it could be used as a raft.

Red-eyed at the end of a five-hour shift, Gerry Vaillancourt, a Charlotte Hornets analyst on WODT-AM, recalled the stream of calls: “I can’t find my baby! My sister lost her baby! I saw a dead man! I’ve never seen a dead man! I can’t find my 4-year-old son! ... I can’t find my husband!”

From behind the microphone in the studio, he said, New Orleans sounded “like a city being nuked.”

Vaillancourt is a warm, pugnacious man, originally from the Bronx. He was struck, he said, by the power of talk radio -- its intimacy, its burden.

“There’s a family with 15 people in a house with no power, but they can listen,” he said. “You’re on the next shift, and you’re keeping them company, and it’s frightening.”

Vaillancourt got through it with gentle, goofy humor.

He remembers a woman who called, miserable and stranded, and told him she was getting ready to eat. Vaillancourt suggested that she make veal Parmesan, and maybe he would come by with a bottle of Merlot. She said, forlornly, that she didn’t have any of the ingredients.

Then she asked, “What if I just make us a lasagna?”

Then she laughed and laughed.

Mayor Nagin called the station Sept. 1 when Robinette was on the air. Robinette had broadcast every day since the storm hit; he was tired, he said, and “not concentrating the way I should.”

The mayor was tired too. The situation in New Orleans had deteriorated sharply. Thousands of people were milling at the Superdome and the convention center, sick, dehydrated and desperate to get out of the city. Rescue crews, alarmed about reports of rioting, were afraid to pull off the interstate.

Robinette was expecting a report from the mayor, but what he got was a half-hour roar of anger and despair. It was the sound of a man who no longer cared about his political future.

“You know,” Nagin said, “God is looking down on all this, and if [state and federal authorities] are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they’re dying by the hundreds, I’m willing to bet you.

“We’re getting reports and calls that are breaking my heart, from people saying: ‘I’ve been in my attic. I can’t take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don’t think I can hold out.’ And that’s happening as we speak.”

Nagin went on and on, until both men fell silent. On the air, Robinette could be heard crying. The station cut to a commercial.

That interview, Robinette said, was “the off-the-cliff moment and the flying moment.”

Mike Kaplan, operations manager at Entercom’s adult contemporary station, was listening at the master control. His first thought was that the mayor’s profanity-laced outburst might have violated Federal Communications Commission standards. His second thought was about history. He asked: Is someone taping this? He pressed a record button.

“He said, ‘Di, I want to get that out to everyone in the country,’ ” Newman said.

The tape was driven across town to the local CBS affiliate. By the next day, Nagin’s interview was airing on all three networks.

Within 24 hours, President Bush visited New Orleans.

“When they write the history of Katrina, it will be written on the turn of Ray Nagin,” Robinette said. “That was a guy pulling babies out of the water. That was the power of it. It was one man furious.”

Many WWL employees are still living in RVs beside the parking lot of the Clear Channel building, sleeping in four-hour shifts.

Suitcases sat in cubicles, and over the PA system, a receptionist announced that grief counselors were on hand for anyone who needed them. No one showed up, though, probably because they were too busy.

Lewis found that he could no longer perform simple arithmetic. Sales manager Mark Boudreaux was reminding people to remind him of things. Newman, fuzzy-headed with exhaustion, accidentally placed her new cellphone in a cup of coffee. She didn’t care, she said: “What matters is what comes out of that box.”

A note of calm entered the calls this week. Listeners now wanted contact numbers for the Red Cross, they wanted to know if they should boil their water, they wanted to reunite with family members.

Bellavia, 34, who was diagnosed last year with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, feels the way he felt when he found out his tumor was gone: guilty that he has walked away when so many others died.

Leaving the station every night, for the hourlong drive to his home in Amite, 50 miles northeast of Baton Rouge, he “began to feel like a machine,” he said.

“I’ll put it like this: I haven’t broken down, but I wonder when I will,” Bellavia said. “I wonder when I will, how you say, shut down and reboot.”

Robinette, who was awarded two purple hearts in Vietnam, said the week of the flood was “all adrenaline. I used to say, overseas, that nobody’s afraid during a firefight. When it’s over, it’s very scary.”

These days, Robinette takes calls from people who want to thank him or the station and say how grateful they are. Something about that sickens him. Radio, he said, has not done anything for the people of New Orleans.

“It’s what the people of New Orleans have done for radio. You want to say, ‘You’re the ones dying,’ ” he said. Then he hung his head and sobbed.

As for Duplantis, whose house was probably engulfed in the 25-foot surge that hit St. Bernard Parish, he doesn’t spend much time cataloging his losses.

“I don’t even think about it. What am I going to think about?” Duplantis, 42, said. “I just work.”

And so the broadcasts continue. They are not archived, so there is no record of the hundreds of ordinary people who called the station at the strangest, most terrifying moments of their lives.

In the early hours of Sept. 2, several million radio listeners east of the Rocky Mountains could hear the voice of a man on his roof in New Orleans describing what the stars looked like over a city in darkness.

The man’s voice sounded serene and mellow. At that moment, he was in total isolation -- speaking from his rooftop in a city filling up with reeking water, SWAT teams and crowds of angry, hungry, frightened people.

No one could have gotten to him that night, and it is impossible to know whether he survived. But his voice was carried on the 50,000-watt signal of WWL-AM. He sounded close enough to touch.