The Whole World Is Listening: WHAS Radio Coverage of the 1937 Ohio River Flood
By Chris Chandler

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Hundreds dead; hundreds of thousands homeless; entire cities emptied and virtually obliterated by one of the century’s worst killer storms—all while millions of Americans followed the drama from their living rooms, over the airwaves. Nearly 70 years before Hurricane Katrina grabbed national and international headlines, the devastating Ohio River flood of 1937 became the great broadcast media event of its time.

The historic disaster, which killed 385 people in a swath from Pittsburgh to Paducah and caused a half-billion dollars in damage, was a major milestone for a still-young industry called radio. The fledgling medium best known for Amos ’n’ Andy, dance music and daytime soaps suddenly faced its first genuine life-or-death national crisis—one with no certain outcome or end date, and one for which no template or format existed from past experience. Broadcasters invented, improvised, begged, borrowed and pillaged even as rising floodwaters—and history—swirled around them. The results attained near-mythical status in the region, and became a major (if largely unheralded) influence in forging techniques and traditions that broadcast journalists employ to this day.

January 1937 was already a soggy one in the Ohio and lower Mississippi valleys; eventually, rain would fall 27 of 31 days. At 11:29 a.m. on Thursday, January 21, station WHAS in Louisville, Ky., broadcast its first flood warning. Still, as with Katrina seven decades later, the scope of the crisis was understood only slowly, as what first seemed a serious, but hardly historic, flooding rain de-veloped into an unending torrent. The precipitation that began falling on January 21 simply did not stop, and by the 24th, the crisis was dire enough that the date is remembered even now as “Black Sunday.” “We thought it was the end of the world,” Ohio broadcaster Ruth Lyons remembered in 1957. In Cincinnati the river was 25 feet above flood stage, and a massive fire threatened to engulf the city. Leaking gasoline gushed through flooded downtown streets, and three dozen fire companies made a stand near the Crosley Radio plant as a nationwide audience followed the drama via Cincinnati’s WLW reports broadcast over the NBC network:

The Ohio River continues to rise at approximately 3/10 of a foot per hour…rains up and down the river from Pittsburgh to Louisville are continuing….The fires which threatened the entire western section of Cincinnati this morning are reported under control at this hour, although reports are reaching us constantly of huge gasoline tanks being torn from their foundations in various parts of the community and spewing their highly inflammable contents over the floodwaters to be spread over large areas….Traffic across the suspension bridge connecting Covington, Kentucky with Cincinnati has for the time being been suspended….The floodwaters have been closing the approaches on both sides of the river….There’s a most urgent need for food, clothing, and shelter. Medical supplies are also needed.

To the south of Cincinnati, flood damage had doused most of the electricity in Louisville and rendered the police radio inoperable. With commercial broadcasting suddenly the only method of contact between emergency agencies, rescue crews, desperate refugees and the outside world, WHAS station executives made an unprecedented decision to abandon all commercial programs and broadcast only emergency announcements for the duration. Thousands of dollars in lost revenue aside, there seemed little choice. The number of distress messages reaching the station had mushroomed into the thousands, arriving by telephone, telegraph, ham radio and simple word of mouth. The messages were frantically typed and edited in a cold, oil-lamp-lit office, then “chased” to announcers waiting before the microphone, and broadcast by flickering gaslight.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, American History, Journalists

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