Dealing with a hurricane is nothing new for New Orleans and broadcasters swung into action as Katrina came ashore as the strongest storm to hit the city in many decades. In this case, studios in the heart of the city were right in the hardest hit areas.

Entercom VP/Engineering Marty Hadfield gave us a run-down of what damage he knows of so far at Entercom's six stations in New Orleans. The main studios building downtown at the Hyatt Regency has been breached (studio and office windows blown out), but staffers remain in the structure's more protected core. 50,000 watt WWL went off yesterday morning, after simulcasting hurricane info to all six Big Easy Entercom stations. The company's FMs continued coverage, but have been on and off the air intermittently.

As soon as the storm hit, the NAB and Red Cross asked stations across the nation to help with relief efforts. Radio PSAs can be downloaded from www.nab.org and TV stations can get a free overnight dub by contacting Sarah Roberts as [email protected]. "We salute local broadcasters along the Gulf Coast for their tremendous coverage in recent days tracking Hurricane Katrina and serving as a lifeline for citizens in need. Now as attention turns to the clean-up effort, we urge radio and TV stations to carry these timely Red Cross PSAs to help our citizens who were victims of the hurricane," said NAB President & CEO Eddie Fritts.

RBR/TVBR was able to watch the live video streams of WWL-TV (Ch. 4, CBS) and WDSU-TV (Ch. 6, NBC), both of which had to use out of town studios to anchor part of their coverage. WWL-TV also reported that it was off the air from time to time, but kept delivering information via the Internet.

---

More details.

Says Entercom's Hadfield: "WWL did go off the air about 7AM Monday. We're not sure if it's back on yet or not (as of yesterday afternoon), because we not only have the main towers, but we also have a licensed longwire antenna for emergency purposes with a 10-Kw transmitter dedicated to that. We also have a contingency plan, because one of our other AM stations, WSMB, is a two-tower directional. This will take another day or so if we have to do this, but we can broadcast from over at that other site."

He adds, "I'm actually listening to the raw feeds on a backup remote line situation that we've got. We can hear that they're still in good spirits, but things are really tough there, it sounds like. We have these receivers set up in the studios that can pick up off the air signals and they feed it out for our PDs to listen to. The last reports from WWL on email was about the time they went off the air, although they are still connected to our system - - it's bizarre. I thought for sure the studio generator was going to go off, but I guess the water is only a foot deep in that part of town so far. The feed I'm listening to now says there is about two feet of water in downtown and they had a report from one of the WWL reporters in her home that said they are trapped and the water is already up to the first floor windows in their house."

Hadfield says they have some engineers in Baton Rouge waiting on standby that will particularly address the AM recovery project and at minimum, some tune-up work. "We don't know if we've lost towers. The generator building and pretty much everything else out there is pretty hardened, but its always possible there was a breach out there. The transmitter building is 20 feet above grade and was actually designed for hurricanes. But if we've lost some towers and the longwire, then we have to come up with some alternatives. I've already contacted some tower companies and some crews in that regard. One concern we have is the police, military/National Guard may not let our engineers in to do their work [today]."

As hurricane veterans, most TV crews had the good sense to stay inside at the height of the storm, then ventured out to record the devastation. After all, what purpose is served by yet another picture of a reporter standing against the wind as debris blows past? The focus was on emergency information - - for example, telling people which areas had to boil water.

RBR observation:
From what we could see and hear, local broadcasters did a terrific job of providing useful information to their local audience. Staffers pitched in and keep emergency information flowing, despite difficult conditions. But then, that's only what broadcasters are supposed to do - - and have been doing for many decades.