"I remember telling my wife: I‘ve been covering hurricanes for 20 years. They always enter the Gulf as category 12s and come ashore as category 1s… I said there’s not going to be anything to this.”
That's what Garland Robinette, former WWL radio host, remembers as he prepared to go on the air a few days prior to August 29th, 2005.
Then, at 4 pm on Friday, August 26th, the National Weather Service made an announcement: The forecasts shifted; it wasn’t headed for the Florida panhandle. In 72 hours, a Category 5 hurricane named Katrina would hit New Orleans.
“All hell broke loose,” Robinette tells WWL News Director Dave Cohen. “What I remember primarily was you guys locking me in a closet.”
Cohen (who was also WWL News Director at the time) replies, “The windows had blown out while you were on the air. The Superdome roof came through our studio windows. The engineers gave you as much mic chord as they could find. You ran out of the studio and sat in the closet with no windows.”
“I told somebody yesterday,” Robinette adds, “I didn’t really experience a hurricane. Everyone was terrified, but I was talking to myself in a closet.”
The next morning, Robinette came out of the closet to assess the initial storm damage.
“We thought it was bad but not horrible,” Robinette says.
Then the following morning Cohen announced on WWL: The levees had broken.
Robinette recounts what crossed his mind when as drove to heard the news.
“The main thing that went through my mind was totally different from everybody else. All I could think of was how, in 1970, I met a geologist at the state legislature. He told me about something called 'Loss of wetlands.' He took me to his office and showed me photos he had set up like a Disney-cel-automatic-machine. He hit a button, and I saw the coast of Louisiana start to dissolve…He told me the Louisiana coastline is losing 16.1 square miles per year.”
“That’s the point I thought about in Baton Rouge,” Robinette recalls. “All the way through the storm. Every time somebody called and said, ‘How did this happen?’ I was furious.”
While with his family in Natchez, Robinette was off air, but spent that time listening to WWL coverage. As he heard about the recovery efforts, with growing fury, Robinette realized that neither the state nor the federal government planned to help.
"I was in Aceh, Indonesia, when the Tsunami hit. The U.S. hospital ship was there a day later," says Robinette. "And here we are—three to five days after—nobody's coming."
Once Robinette returned to air a few days later, he described his radio campaign as all-out war.
“When I hit the air, I was dangerous because I was pissed. I didn't care if I made the governor mad, the mayor mad. Anybody. I was attacking everybody in sight," Robinette recalls.
For days, Garland roared, which resulted in an interview with Mayor Ray Nagin, often credited as the moment that catapulted the plight of a post-Katrina New Orleans to an international scale.
Robinette recounts that day, “Yep—that was a heck of a day. I've been in war, I spent 13 months in the worst combat you can imagine, but that day with Nagin was right up there."
Nagin called in and railed against the federal government's weak response, and painted a picture of desperation and a city trapped in rising floods, lethal humidity, and scarce resources. People across the Gulf were dying in attics, on rooftops, still with no aid.
“I think he was trying to be a normal person when we first began, and I think I was so angry, and I was so non-normal, I think it infected him. And he got angry too,” Robinette says of Nagin. “I’ll never forget I had people send me headlines from China, from Europe, from South America: New Orleans mayor and some radio guy have angry conversation. It went worldwide.”
Ray Nagin's interview with Garland Robinette on WWL Radio
"They don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time, two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras AP reporters, all kinds of god damn--excuse my French, everybody in America--but I am pissed." (Ray Nagin on WWL with Garland Robinette, Sept 4th, 2005.)
Robinette recounts his disbelief upon realizing the global impact of his interview, "My producer comes in the first day back and says, ‘You’ve got the Netherlands on line one, you’ve got Australia on line two, you've got Germany on line 3,’ and on and on and on…I said how can this be?"
Eventually, after the interview with Nagin, the White House and the Louisiana State legislature got together and decided to send the National Guard and active military into New Orleans. Fleets of buses appeared. Help was on the way...
“Days and days and days later," says Robinette. "It was, I think, one of America’s most shameful moments."
After months of calling out the insufficiency of the federal government's response, Helen Centanni, Robinette's producer, got a call from President Bush.
“He said, 'I want a one-on-one with this guy, just him and me.'" Robinette recalls.
Sticking with New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina
For 71 days, 24 hours a day, WWL stayed on the air. Every day, Garland took to the air, demanding action and inviting people to call in and use the station as a broadcast line for those disconnected from loved ones after the storm. In many cases, people would call and reconnect with family members who were scattered all across the country.
“It happened almost every time (someone called in), that's what was so amazing,” Robinette explains. “In the beginning, we thought, you know, it's fresh. It's a day old… But it went on for a long time. It was amazing. But if we didn’t have the backup, you (Cohen), Diane, and the engineers..." explains Robinette... "A lot of people didn't get any credit whatsoever, and the people on the air or whatever speaking words, being the voice of Katrina, all this bullshit. It was a group effort. I think seldom has any company worked more together… The people on the air got the attention, but the heroes were definitely behind the scenes.”
While there were high points like reconnecting broken families, Garland also recalls his nationally broadcast screaming matches with state officials, where he stood in opposition to their encouragement to return to New Orleans.
“You forget I was very unpopular. I had on-air raging arguments with the governor, with the legislature, with the mayor. Why are you telling everybody to come back? They're going to face high interest rates. Infrastructure that doesn't work and costs too much to fully repair. Street collapses. Schools that are restricted because of the storm. I had a lot of people sending hate mail.”
“I always knew New Orleans would come back… That sliver on the river will always survive. It’s high land... But for the areas that are in the bowl, there’s always a threat of this happening again... I still think it's sad that to this day, steps have not been taken to prioritize land loss,” Garland laments.
During Robinette’s historic interview with President Bush, he urged the president to commit to prioritizing coastal restoration to help mitigate the effects of future hurricanes. While Bush made those promises live on WWL radio, 20 years later, Robinette believes those promises were never kept.
“I don’t think he followed through,” says Robinette. “He and I had a big argument off-camera about what has been done, what should be done. The problem is - I saw it in war. When someone’s shooting at you, you’re attention is focused, it's all about survival. Katrina was a bullet.”
But Robinette believes, as humans tend to do, that the focus Katrina created was lost.
“We’re all like… I know we’re losing the wetlands, but I love Jazz Fest, LSU, Tulane, the Saints—we’ll get around to it eventually. I think it’s the human condition,” says Robinette.
“We built a 14-billion-dollar wall around the city we can’t afford to maintain,” he says. “We’re no longer losing 16.1 square miles (of coastline a year) because there’s so little land to lose. But when the 9th ward looks like Biloxi, this city is in trouble.”
“I hate to be Mr. Negative,” Robinette concludes. “If I’m wrong, somebody tell me. But I’m not.”
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