10/12/2024
By Michelle Southern
Local radio in Louisiana knows this to be true, and now Asheville knows too: local radio saves lives.
I’ll be the first to admit that radio is a fun job. All I ever wanted to be when “I grew up,” was a DJ on the radio.
“It’s better than a real job,” is what you’d hear many of us joke over the years.
But it was in August 2005, seven years into my career at the age of 25, when I quickly learned that radio saves lives. It doesn’t get more real of a job than that.
I was a midday host for a soft rock radio station in my hometown of Baton Rouge when Category 5 Hurricane Katrina had southeast Louisiana directly in her crosshairs.
With an eight-month-old baby at home, I was thrust into an all-hands-on-deck policy. As we were preparing for the worst in Baton Rouge, we learned our company’s New Orleans market was evacuating their staff to our building. I sent two employees to my 1,100 square foot home with their two dogs and their bird to join my baby, my husband and our two dogs.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, CBS News reported WWNC host Mark Starling and his producer, Tank Spencer, were a lifeline to residents of Asheville, NC.
“We’ve got to walk these people through the storm,” said Starling. Then the station became inundated with phone calls.
When I read that, I was brought back to August 2005. Our group had six stations simulcasting out of one studio, feverishly getting emergency information from our local officials off the fax machine to announce to our audience. That’s when the calls came in from people begging for help. With widespread power outages, all they had was a radio. The phone did not stop ringing for days.
Starling said once they realized they were all these people had, they were on a mission.
This feeling is real. After days of sleeping at the station and hours of helping with Katrina coverage, someone finally convinced me to go home to my baby. As I was leaving the stations with my New Orleans co-worker who had evacuated to my house, we noticed the floor-to-ceiling windows of the front of the building covered with notes from people begging us to make announcements.
“My daughter was stuck on the 5th floor at Xavier University! Can somebody please let me know if that building is still standing?!”
We grabbed every note, turned around and went straight back to join the broadcast. We read the letters over the air, one by one.
I’ve covered many natural disasters in Louisiana since, but nothing compares to what happened on the radio after Katrina in 2005.
We saved lives. And Mark and Tank are still saving lives in the mountains of North Carolina.
Local radio saves lives.
