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handeaux · 2 months

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Your Grandparents Canoodled In Passionate Petting Parties Along Cincinnati’s Country Lanes

Around one hundred years ago, a new theme was introduced to the long-established images decorating paper Valentines. While hearts and flowers, little birds and rosy-cheeked children still predominated, the Valentines of 1924 often featured something new – the motor car.

While innocent enough when surrounded by lace and flowers, the motor car had already begun to arouse the suspicions of Cincinnati parents. The old fogies suspected that automobiles represented much more than transportation to the kids. Those jalopies might be nefarious vehicles of illicit lust!

Well, the old folks were correct. Young people throughout Cincinnati were tootling out to the nearest country byway and canoodling in extended make-out sessions known as “petting parties.” The Cincinnati Business Women’s Club got together to grumble about “rolled stockings, petting parties and abbreviated bathing suits as they affect the adolescent girl.” The Cincinnati Post [4 April 1924] quoted Alma Hillhouse, educational director of Cincinnati’s Social Hygiene Society:

“The child gets its instinct for petting from the mother. When a babe she is held on the mother’s knee and fondled. When she grows up she seeks satisfaction in petting parties. It is the standards in the home that count. The daughter of the wise mother will come through petting parties unscathed; the uncontrolled girl comes to grief.”

You will notice that neither Dad nor any adolescent males are assigned any sort of accountability in this matter. Some things never change.

While the Business Women’s Club debated, the Indian Hill Rangers, organized, according to the Enquirer [3 June 1924], to “trail horse thieves, cattle rustlers and pillagers of hen roosts,” were confronted with a new threat to village security.

“Indian Hill Rangers are after motorists who have been using the shady lanes and sylvan retreats of that pretty hilltop east of the city and the adjoining countryside for ‘petting’ and gin parties.”

One evening, the Rangers encountered a limousine parked on Drake Road, its windows curtained with newspapers. While not disturbing the occupants, the Rangers copied the license number and mailed a letter to the owner, a woman living in Avondale. They never saw that particular vehicle again.

While Indian Hill was dealing with limousines, the real action was out in the Western Hills among the still-rural expanses of Delhi and Green townships. According to the Enquirer [14 October 1924]:

“For months residents have complained that autoists have forsaken the dim-lighted parlor and its sofa for the moonlit roadside and the cushioned seats of the automobile. Even private driveways and lawns have been converted into trysting bowers by these seekers for seclusion, who have openly defied property owners to the extent of drawing weapons on them, it has been stated.”

Alfred Bennett of Green Township blamed the recent crackdown on Cincinnati’s “red light” district in the West End for the flight of depraved and lustful characters into the hinterlands. He told the Enquirer [25 October 1924} that illicit smooching was just the beginning:

“‘Much of the objectionable practices in country districts is not entirely “petting parties,”’ Mr. Bennett stated, ‘but gross immoralities that shock the residents.’”

So gross were these alleged immoralities that they inspired a flurry of ecumenism between the Catholic and Protestant congregations of Bridgetown, with the Rev. Paul Schmidt of the Evangelical Protestant Church standing shoulder to shoulder with Father William Spickerman of Saint Aloysius Catholic Church in demanding more patrols by the county sheriff. The clergymen offered to recruit volunteer deputies from among their flocks. In neighboring Delhi Township, Justice of the Peace M.J. Roebling lumped petting party participants among nuisances such as “bootleggers, bandits and hold-up men.”

The Delhi magistrate wasn’t that far off, it seems. Widespread outrage about romantic parkers, combined with very public statements by the county sheriff that he did not have the budget nor the manpower to patrol the county’s lovers’ lanes, suggested a business opportunity for the local footpads. The Enquirer [28 July 1924] reported that outlaws impersonating county deputies were robbing couples caught on deserted roads:

“Two more hold-ups were committed late last night by a gang of five bandits who are blamed for a total of 17 known hold-ups and who, it is said, have collected hundreds of dollars by swooping down on ‘petting parties’ on county highways and extorting money under the guise of deputy officers.”

Many of the township roads favored by passionate petters led to roadhouses established outside city limits to avoid enforcement of Prohibition laws. Cincinnati’s Juvenile Protective Association claimed that the immoral environment promoted by these roadhouses spilled over into steamy backseats. And, of course, the media were blamed as well. A new film, “Daughters of Today,” written by a one-time Cincinnati newspaper reporter named Lucien Hubbard and starring Zazu Pitts, opened that year. According to the Enquirer [29 September 1924]:

“It is an ultra jazz production, with petting parties, cocktail shakers and syncopation distributed throughout the length of its half dozen or more reels.”

By October 1924, the scandal had reached such an extremity that the Cincinnati Automobile Club passed a strongly worded resolution condemning “petting parties” as a safety hazard and demanding more patrols by the sheriff. So vehement was the public condemnation of “petting parties” that the Enquirer actually editorialized in favor of passionate parking because a total crackdown would force hormonal youngsters into petting while driving and thereby endanger pedestrians!

Although it is unlikely the Automobile Club’s wrath had any effect, by the next year the Cincinnati Post [20 July 1925] reported that petting parties, the bane of 1924, seemed to be passé in 1925. Two deputy sheriffs spent a long and fruitless summer evening looking for lovers along the East Miami River in Anderson Township:

“In two hours, we found only one spooner. That was on Broadwell-rd, where a boy and his sweetie were spooning in the moonlight to the strains of a victrola on the back seat of their machine.”

#petting parties #indian hill #bridgetown #delhi township #green township

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wutaijiemei · 1 year

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tumblr has become evangelical roadside billboard.

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mourningmaybells · 2 years

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it’s so funny that the old hollywood roadside biblical epics are just forced samson and delilah ad nauseum. i hate misogyny. also, some of these critics are so upset by the lack of sex appeal. what’s wrong with these evangelicals.

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starfxckersinc · 1 month

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I’m from (45 mins) outside the Roanoke area and yes almost everyone I met, even the people from trailer parks and the people who were struggling, were very racist or homophobic and usually both. Yes there was a massive conservative thing going on and almost everyone was religious in some capacity. Christianity and church life were completely expected of you. The public schools were completely underfunded, the town was horribly depressed, our high school is risking loosing accreditation which u need to go to a 4 year university and actually escape. All of those things are awful and should be fixed for the people living there but the people who lived there tried to frame the Hispanic community so they’d be arrested, the people there defended the confederacy constantly, the people there got us put on the news for being horribly racist during the 2020 riots, the people there have an evangelical church that they’ve converted into a shrine to Donald Trump where they’re selling trump merch and confederate flags and actually right across the street from that they’re supposedly selling racist caricatures of Black people in like. the pottery area (?) of this one roadside store. from my perspective on the white community there (I can’t speak for the Black or Hispanic communities) like they do truly fucking suck shit, for so many reasons, and have fucked their kids over to suck shit too and be miserable and be stuck. and I only got out coz I was privileged and could do it. I just hate it when people romanticize it there or whatever bc it actually like is actively horrible if you’re gay + transgender + not a fucking actual demon from hell and I can only imagine what it would be like to live there and not be white bc I’m sure it’s really shit. i hate 90% of those people that I knew and I never want to go back except my family is there and I do love the rivers and the trees and the farm in the spring time, all that was ever good there was the nature. i do miss that. and idgaf what your personal relationship to Appalachia is I fucking hated it and it was awful and there are legitimate problems that exist in the south that are hundreds of years old that we have to admit to and actually find a way to fix

#aberdeen spoken word

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the-ablest-navigators · 2 years

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Declaration on the two-lane.

#iphone photography #abandoned #roadside evangelism #southern gothic #faith

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dyingforbadmusic · 2 years

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Abandoned Works of God

#abandoned #roadside evangelism #arkansas

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henry-harrison-mayes · 2 years

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Get Right With God

Harrison Mayes Railroad sign, April 1999 Trenton, Michigan

(from A Coal Miner's Simple Message by Catherine Mayes)

#sign #harrison mayes #roadside evangelism

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exitpursuedbyasloth · 4 years

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@welkinalauda said: everyone forgets President Rooney

Oh heck, I totally did, and was that his name? I just kept calling him President White-Guy NotObama.

God, that plot was stupid. Also it’s canon that both Trump and Obama were president in the SPNverse, but then randomly, some evangelical mofo is POTUS, and also wanders around roadside motels to hook up with his secretary without significant Secret Service protection? Why are SPN writers so BAD at writing just...reality, like the basic functions of how things work. Why do they think tattoos heal instantly and only cost pocket change? Why do they so often forget the geographical position of Kansas? Do they not own a map? Why do they think a slice of pie can sit on a bed for months and not decay?

#stupid shit that annoys me #Trashnatural #welkinalauda #I don't know the right way to respond to replys

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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In America, Privilege is Far More Fatal than COVID Yesterday, I received a report from Syria. It told of blistering heat and no electricity, of fuel lines, of food shortages and economic suffering by the Syrian people. This is an excerpt: “I wonder if people in EU, US and UK had to deal with the repercussions of their government sanctions on Syria, would they fight harder to get sanctions banned as a hybrid war, sadistic strategy. It is 41 degrees in Damascus, the cloud cover makes it heavy and oppressive. Electricity where I am is on for an hour, sometimes two before it cuts for three or four hours, just as the air conditioning makes your environment bearable. For some living close to me, they were without electricity for 14 hours in this sweltering heat. I wet my clothes to keep me cool while I am working, it is the only thing that helps. Mobile phones do not have time to charge. Food goes rotten because the fridge is off much of the time. Syrians traditionally store enough food in their freezer to last them two or three months. They are having to throw much of it away. At the same time, food prices are sky high. Nobody can afford to eat luxury items like chicken anymore. Lemons have become a luxury item, the price of one kilo has trebled in a few months. Parents do not know if they can feed their kids every day, they are living hand to mouth. All the roadside kiosks are seeing their livelihood go down the drain, literally, as everything in their freezer section melts or goes bad. The queues for fuel, while not as bad as before, are still a stressful scrum with cars lining up to take their ration. These are only a few of the effects of sanctions. Sanctions are designed to hurt, to deprive, to depress and, ultimately, to kill slowly and more painfully than the swift ending of life by a mortar or a bullet. Sanctions strip people of their dignity and leave them beggars in their own home.” Syria is but one nation targeted by the Trump regime, there are others and the stories like this are in the millions, told by those who still live. When Syria was attacked, it was not just starvation, it was terrorism as well with up to 400,000 dead and 5 million refugees. Iraq suffered a far worse fate, 2,000,000 dead. Both nations are still partially occupied by the United States, the nation that engineered this suffering. Now it is all coming home to roost, as here in the United States, what was done to Syria and Iraq, to Yemen and Iran, and to the best of Trump’s ability Venezuela’s people as well, is being deployed against the most vulnerable of Americans. We had another police killing yesterday, one we know of, there may well be others, in fact it is likely. This was in Los Angeles, another African American, his crime was riding a bicycle “improperly.” To understand how privilege applies, Dylan Roof, white mass murderer who killed 9 a the Emanuel AME Church was arrested with considerable care and, before being processed, was taken to the local Burger King for lunch by police as Dylan told them that murdering so many people “made him feel hungry.” As American humorist Jim W. Dean so often says; “You just can’t make this stuff up.” This is not unusual, this is the norm, this is how things work but you will not know unless you ask people, people who trust you with the truth. Problem there, the divide in America is so profound that the victims of insanity and brutality that started long before the current epidemic under Trump don’t want to talk to the media, such as it is and have no faith in political process. You see, political process in America reeks of corruption and privilege as well. Privilege, as with exceptionalism, is a form of corruption whether it is state sponsored apartheid as in Israel or the other version of apartheid, the American one, with walls and children in cages and bodies in the streets. Let us be clear about something else, while the media tries to smear the most well know victims like Beonna Taylor, every person of color in the United States is victimized unless “hand selected” like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a despicable human being reviled for his love of all things fascist. We might take a moment to discuss Breonna Taylor as well. This is a young woman of color living in Louisville, Kentucky, employed as a paramedic/first responder. Police broke into her home and killed her based on a false warrant. This is someone who had never committed a crime of any kind, police simply kicked down her door and murdered her for being black skinned, there is no other explanation. Yesterday, according to reports in the Washington Post, local prosecutor Tom Wine, a Trump backer, offered freedom to a number of drug suspects, if they would falsely incriminate Beonna Taylor, in order to aid Donald Trump in his election chances. Sources tell us Wine would then be nominated as US Attorney by Trump appointee William Barr. This level of corruption is seen every single day, even reported every single day but as the victims are of color in a land of “white privilege,” those who protest being falsely imprisoned or murdered by police are “violent hooligans.” Again, “you just can’t make this stuff up.” To understand the violence that is sweeping America today one can easily look at the violence that has swept the world, not just after 9/11 but long before. There are two words that are one in the same, one personal, one far greater, both are fatal. They are privilege and exceptionalism. The nature of “privilege” is insidious. For those who do not have COVID, for instance, who are not on a respirator or mourning the hundreds of thousands now dead, the disease is “fake.” This is privilege, denialism of the suffering of others because they are “others.” An unreported fact, nearly 4,000,000 older Americans live in nursing homes or residential facilities. None have been visited by family for nearly 6 months. Over 150,000 have died of COVID but reports that are creeping in speak of malnutrition, bed sores and widespread abuse and there is no one to help as families are not allowed to see their forgotten elders. The result of this, of course, is that older Americans have now become defacto “people of color” and reside in defacto “cages” like little brown babies ripped away from their mothers to amuse Trump’s political “base.” The insidious nature of privilege is that it can infect anyone, whatever their race or ethnicity. Privilege has become a hallmark of some religions, such as Christian Evangelism, infecting 35,000,000 Americans who attend church, pray continually but bask in a belief system that feeds exceptionalism and hatred. Privilege and exceptionalism are most often driven by fear. For some inherited money drives the unearned feeling of superiority, though Trump has, to a large extent, destroyed this concept through his bumbling ineptitude. Even the drooling Baron Rothschild and his carriage drawn through London by a team of zebras was not able to do that. If you are poor and white in America, “at least you aren’t black.” Thus, those who are otherwise the most marginal and vulnerable, not in all cases but some, perhaps many, take solace in having someone beneath them. “The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he does not permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor to anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.” – Carlos Castaneda Turning to Castaneda, whose “Way of the Warrior” defined excellence for so many during the 60’s and 70’s, in a way defines the failures in America’s culture today. “The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.” – Carlos Castaneda What can safely be generalized about how things really are in America? Yesterday I spent time with one of my friends, a painting contractor, American born Hispanic who speaks no Spanish, highly successful, and we discussed local police in my own affluent community. His experiences with the same police who are to me beyond polite and helpful, not so helpful mind you that I would ever depend on them for protection, are quite the opposite of mine. I now know there is a problem. Will I do or say nothing and if I find our community subject to disorder because of our collective indifference to the rights of all, will I be surprised? Am I privileged and exceptionalist? Were it not for time I spent as a police officer decades ago, a miserable job, his words would seem unreasonable but anyone who has worked in law enforcement knows that the greatest stress isn’t from the public, too often referred to as “potential suspects,” but rather from corrupt and ignorant coworkers. It does not take long to see that they are the real criminals. As a former police officer, one is typically never stopped by police or if one is, one is immediately not just released but usually engaged in friendly banter. To be clear, some departments are better than others, but none are perfect and some, like Kenosha, Wisconsin, are brutally incompetent and dangerous. What we have also seen at mass killing like Columbine or during the fear driven killings that are sending hundreds of thousands into the streets, many police are quite simply cowards with guns, a very dangerous combination. Many, however, are not. Many are competent, polite, professional and often end up sacrificing their lives for others. The problem there is that if you are one of these, working with the others is a nightmare. In many cases, “good police” are ostracized and threatened for failing to be corrupt, which is my own experience. This makes the job impossible and the victims are many, certainly good police suffer as they invariably are commanded by the most corrupt and incompetent but the communities they supposedly serve suffer as well. This is the case with Kenosha. There, the police department, as a whole, is generally seen by other police as very poor quality, highly corrupt, racially biased and a very bad place to work. For the community, if you are white, you won’t be arrested unless you do something exceptionally bad and if you are a powerful “insider,” you can never be arrested at all as police are likely to aid and abet in any criminal acts. In the post George Floyd world, however, it is the community that has allowed its police to degenerate into a “blue gang” that is suffering now, subjected to violent protests which are, quite frankly extremely well deserved. Each community has a choice, to stand for justice for all, which should be equal enforcement of the law and, if need be, strong but fair and legal crackdowns on criminal elements even if such elements are people of color. Police are there to investigate and take potential offenders into custody, based on reasonable procedures, where fair courts administer laws. The truth is everything, but this happens. Police administer punishment, too often based on hatred driven by misguided privilege and institutionalized corruption and extremism. As cohorts in “blue gang” violence, prosecutors and many judges throw law, justice and the constitution aside to the extent that any attorney representing a criminal defendant feels overwhelmed. Time and time again, trials are a mockery and lying police and fake evidence rule every process, all openly accepted not just by insiders but the media and the privileged and exceptionalist community as well. Worse still, in many cases those of color who manage to rise into “the system” become the worst of the worst, almost accepted by their white brethren, which is why we included the Castaneda quotes. The disease, as we define it is privilege. The byproduct is dehumanization and indifference. This is a disease so powerful that very few can stand up to it and fewer still can admit it exists or if they choose to do so, go to great lengths to misdefine it. We began by discussing Syria but what is happening there, engineered by “privileged exceptionalists” driven by extremism, is terrorism in its purist form. American policing may well be described as institutionalized terrorism as well. Every child in America can at some time be caged, certainly if of color or if one’s parents are of questionable ancestry. Every American can be murdered by police with impunity. In fact, the massive ownership of assault weapons by Americans is driven by a fear of police. Rural and suburban communities, where gun ownership is greatest, are not subject to even the rumor of “racial violence” that the media stokes with every word. Every spectrum of politics from right or left shares one thing with those of color, distrust of government and fear of assault not by armed criminals but by armed criminal police. The sad thing is that too many take solace in the fact that they will be the last to go, not the first. From Martin Niemoller: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” And so it goes…

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officialyourdailyinspiration · 4 years

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Today in Christian History

Today is Friday, March 27th, the 86th day of 2019. There are 280 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

853: Death of Haymo, a Saxon monk and scholar, and founder of the library of Halberstadt.

1329: Pope John XXII issues In Agro Dominico condemning twenty-eight propositions of the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart.

1378: Death of Pope Gregory XI, the last internationally-agreed-upon pope to reign in Avignon. Antipopes will reign there, however, because rivalries for the papacy after his death will result in the “Great Schism,” in which popes and antipopes vie for control of Christendom.

1555: Nineteen-year-old William Hunter is burned to death in Brentwood, England, for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. He had resisted both threats and bribes.

1683: King Christian V of Denmark commissions pastor and poet Thomas Kingo to prepare a new hymnal for use in Danish churches.

1716: Death of George Keith, an Anglican rector. As a young man, Keith had joined the Quakers but later withdrew from them, believing their doctrine had drifted from truth, and became instead an Anglican priest. He had served as a missionary to American Quakers before becoming a rector in Sussex, England.

1837: Death at Bancoorah, India, of James, a convert from Hinduism. After his conversion, he had superintended a string of Christian schools and evangelized his own people as he had opportunity, overcoming the prejudices of his father, brothers, and some others who became Christians.

1889: Death in Britain of John Bright, an English Quaker parliamentarian, famous for his speeches and advocacy of reforms.

1920: Death of Francis Nathan Peloubet, American Congregational clergyman known for his annual volumes of Select Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons.

1929: Death in Lausanne, Switzerland, of Charles Henry Brent, an Episcopal priest active in the ecumenical movement. Two years before his death, he had presided over the 1927 World Conference on Faith and Order, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

1930: Bolsheviks shoot Basil Feofanovich Infantyev, a priest of the Bratskaya Church, for “anti-Soviet activity” because he had opposed communist renovations in the teaching and practice of the Russian Orthodox Church. They will harrass his widow after his execution.

Bolsheviks shoot Orthodox priest Basil Borisovich Chubinsky in Barabinsk on accusation of counter-revolutionary activities, and they exile his family.

1981: Alfred Selepe, Nazarene church-planter, pastor, and evangelist in South Africa is attacked by two young men, probably gangsters, and suffers eleven stab wounds but will recover after treatment.

1991: Missionary Lynda Bethea is beaten to death by robbers in Kenya when she and her husband stop to help a “wounded” African lying in the road.

1993: Security officers in Shaanxi Province, China, descend on a house church and beat the leaders. They then force the lay Christians to beat the leaders, too. They beat and expose some of the church’s women, hang some Christians from beams and beat them again, before forcing Lai Manping and several other badly-beaten Christians to crawl eighteen miles to a police station. Fearing than Lai will die in custody, they order him to leave. He is found dead on a roadside, having tried to crawl home.

#Today in Christian History #March 27 #Lai Manping martyred by communist Chinese police #Missionary Lynda Bethea murdered #Bolsheviks shoot Basil Borisovich Chubinsky #death of Charles Henry Brent #Death of Francis Nathan Peloubet #death of John Bright #Death of George Keith #King Christian V of Denmark commissions pastor and poet Thomas Kingo to prepare a new hymnal

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gtunesmiff · 4 years

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Ravi Zacharias (1946 – 2020)

When Ravi Zacharias was a cricket-loving boy on the streets of India, his mother called him in to meet the local sari-seller-turned-palm reader. “Looking at your future, Ravi Baba, you will not travel far or very much in your life,” he declared. “That’s what the lines on your hand tell me. There is no future for you abroad.” By the time a 37-year-old Zacharias preached, at the invitation of Billy Graham, to the inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983, he was on his way to becoming one of the foremost defenders of Christianity’s intellectual credibility. A year later, he founded Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), with the mission of “helping the thinker believe and the believer think.” In the time between the sari seller’s prediction and the founding of RZIM, Zacharias had immigrated to Canada, taken the gospel across North America, prayed with military prisoners in Vietnam and ministered to students in a Cambodia on the brink of collapse. He had also undertaken a global preaching trip as a newly licensed minister with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, along with his wife, Margie, and eldest daughter, Sarah. This trip started in England, worked eastwards through Europe and the Middle East and finished on the Pacific Rim; all-in-all that year, Zacharias preached nearly 600 times in over a dozen countries. It was the culmination of a remarkable transformation set in motion when Zacharias, recovering in a Delhi hospital from a suicide attempt at age 17, was read the words of Jesus recorded in the Bible by the apostle John: “Because I live, you will also live.” In response, Zacharias surrendered his life to Christ and offered up a prayer that if he emerged from the hospital, he would leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of truth. Once Zacharias found the truth of the gospel, his passion for sharing it burned bright until the very end. Even as he returned home from the hospital in Texas, where he had been undergoing chemotherapy, Zacharias was sharing the hope of Jesus to the three nurses who tucked him into his transport. Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias was born in Madras, now Chennai, in 1946, in the shadow of the resting place of the apostle Thomas, known to the world as the “Doubter” but to Zacharias as the “Great Questioner.” Zacharias’s affinity with Thomas meant he was always more interested in the questioner than the question itself. His mother, Isabella, was a teacher. His father, Oscar, who was studying labor relations at the University of Nottingham in England when Zacharias was born, rose through the ranks of the Indian civil service throughout Zacharias’s adolescence. An unremarkable student, Zacharias was more interested in cricket than books, until his encounter with the gospel in that hospital bed. Nevertheless, a bold, radical faith ran in his genes. In the Indian state of Kerala, his paternal great-grandfather and grandfather produced the 20th century’s first Malayalam-English dictionary. This dictionary served as the cornerstone of the first Malayalam translation of the Bible. Further back, Zacharias’s great-great-great-grandmother shocked her Nambudiri family, the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, by converting to Christianity. With conversion came a new surname, Zacharias, and a new path that started her descendants on a road to the Christian faith. Zacharias saw the Lord’s hand at work in his family’s tapestry and he infused RZIM with the same transgenerational and transcultural heart for the gospel. He created a ministry that transcended his personality, where every speaker, whatever their background, presented the truth in the context of the contemporary. Zacharias believed if you achieved that, your message would always be necessary. Thirty-six years since its establishment, the ministry still bears the name chosen for Zacharias’s ancestor. However, where once there was a single speaker, now there are nearly 100 gifted speakers who on any given night can be found sharing the gospel at events across the globe; where once it was run from Zacharias’s home, now the ministry has a presence in 17 countries on five continents. Zacharias’s passion and urgency to take the gospel to all nations was forged in Vietnam, throughout the summer of ’71. Zacharias had immigrated to Canada in 1966, a year after winning a preaching award at a Youth for Christ congress in Hyderabad. It was there, in Toronto, that Ruth Jeffrey, the veteran missionary to Vietnam, heard him preach. She invited him to her adopted land. That summer, Zacharias—only just 25—found himself flown across the country by helicopter gunship to preach at military bases, in hospitals and in prisons to the Vietcong. Most nights Zacharias and his translator Hien Pham would fall asleep to the sound of gunfire. On one trip across remote land, Zacharias and his travel companions’ car broke down. The lone jeep that passed ignored their roadside waves. They finally cranked the engine to life and set off, only to come across the same jeep a few miles on, overturned and riddled with bullets, all four passengers dead. He later said of this moment, “God will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is.” Days later, Zacharias and his translator stood at the graves of six missionaries, killed unarmed when the Vietcong stormed their compound. Zacharias knew some of their children. It was that level of trust in God, and the desire to stand beside those who minister in areas of great risk, that is a hallmark of RZIM. Its support for Christian evangelists in places where many ministries fear to tread, including northern Nigeria, Pakistan, South African townships, the Middle East and North Africa, can be traced back to that formative graveside moment. After this formative trip, Zacharias and his new bride, Margie, moved to Deerfield, Illinois, to study for a Master of Divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Here the young couple lived two doors down from Zacharias’s classmate and friend William Lane Craig. After graduating, Zacharias taught at the Alliance Theological Seminary in New York and continued to travel the country preaching on weekends. Full-time teaching combined with his extensive travel and itinerant preaching led Zacharias to describe these three years as the toughest in his 48-year marriage to Margie. He felt his job at the seminary was changing him and his preaching far more than he was changing lives with the hope of the gospel. It was at that point that Graham invited Zacharias to speak at his inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983. Zacharias didn’t realize Graham even knew who he was, let alone knew about his preaching. In front of 3,800 evangelists from 133 countries, Zacharias opened with the line, “My message is a very difficult one….” He went on to tell them that religions, 20th-century cultures and philosophies had formed “vast chasms between the message of Christ and the mind of man.” Even more difficult was his message, which received a mid-talk ovation, about his fear that, “in certain strands of evangelicalism, we sometimes think it is necessary to so humiliate someone of a different worldview that we think unless we destroy everything he holds valuable, we cannot preach to him the gospel of Christ…what I am saying is this, when you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable.” That talk changed Zacharias’s future and arguably the future of apologetics, dealing with the hard questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny that every worldview must answer. Flying back to the U.S., Zacharias shared his thoughts with Margie. As one colleague has expressed, “He saw the objections and questions of others not as something to be rebuffed, but as a cry of the heart that had to be answered. People weren’t logical problems waiting to be solved; they were people who needed the person of Christ.” No one was reaching out to the thinker, to the questioner. It was on that flight that Zacharias and Margie planted the seed of a ministry intended to meet the thinker where they were, to train cultural evangelist-apologists to reach those opinion makers of society. The seed was watered and nurtured through its early years by the businessman DD Davis, a man who became a father figure to Zacharias. With the establishment of the ministry, the Zacharias family moved south to Atlanta. By now, the family had grown with the addition of a second daughter, Naomi, and a son, Nathan. Atlanta was the city Zacharias would call home for the last 36 years of his life. Meeting the thinker face-to-face was an intrinsic part of Zacharias’s ministry, with post-event Q&A sessions often lasting long into the night. Not to be quelled in the sharing of the gospel, Zacharias also took to the airwaves in the 1980s. Many people, not just in the U.S. but across the world, came to hear the message of Christ for the first time through Zacharias’s radio program, Let My People Think. In weekly half-hour slots, Zacharias explored issues such as the credibility of the Christian message and the Bible, the weakness of modern intellectual movements, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Today, Let My People Think is syndicated to over 2,000 stations in 32 countries and has also been downloaded 15.6 million times as a podcast over the last year. As the ministry grew so did the demands on Zacharias. In 1990, he followed in his father’s footsteps to England. He took a sabbatical at Ridley Hall in Cambridge. It was a time surrounded by family, and where he wrote the first of his 28 books, A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. It was no coincidence that throughout the rhythm of his itinerant life, it was among his family and Margie, in particular, that his writing was at its most productive. Margie inspired each of Zacharias’s books. With her eagle eye and keen mind, she read the first draft of every manuscript, from The Logic of God, which was this year awarded the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Christian Book Award in the category of Bible study, and his latest work, Seeing Jesus from the East, co-authored with colleague Abdu Murray. Others among that list include the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award winner, Can Man Live Without God?, and Christian bestsellers, Jesus Among Other Gods and The Grand Weaver. Zacharias’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into over a dozen languages. Zacharias’s desire to train evangelists undergirded with apologetics, in order to engage with culture shapers, had been happening informally over the years but finally became formal in 2004. It was a momentous year for Zacharias and the ministry with the establishment of OCCA, the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics; the launch of Wellspring International; and Zacharias’s appearance at the United Nations Annual International Prayer Breakfast. OCCA was founded with the help of Professor Alister McGrath, the RZIM team and the staff at Wycliffe Hall, a Permanent Private Hall of Oxford University, where Zacharias was an honorary Senior Research Fellow between 2007 and 2015. Over his lifetime Zacharias would receive 10 honorary doctorates in recognition of his public commitment to Christian thought, including one from the National University of San Marcos, the oldest established university in the Americas. Over the years, OCCA has trained over 400 students from 50 countries who have gone on to carry the gospel in many arenas across the world. Some have continued to follow an explicit calling as evangelists and apologists in Christian settings, and many others have gone on to take up roles in each of the spheres of influence Zacharias always dreamed of reaching: the arts, academia, business, media and politics. In 2017, another apologetics training facility, the Zacharias Institute, was established at the ministry’s headquarters in Atlanta, to continue the work of equipping all who desire to effectively share the gospel and answer the common objections to Christianity with gentleness and respect. In 2014, the same heart lay behind the creation of the RZIM Academy, an online apologetics training curriculum. Across 140 countries, the Academy’s courses have been accessed by thousands in multiple languages. In the same year OCCA was founded, Zacharias launched Wellspring International, the humanitarian division of the ministry. Wellspring International was shaped by the memory of his mother’s heart to work with the destitute and is led by his daughter Naomi. Founded on the principle that love is the most powerful apologetic, it exists to come alongside local partners that meet critical needs of vulnerable women and children around the world. Zacharias’s appearance at the U.N. in 2004 was the second of four that he made in the 21st century and represented his increasing impact in the arena of global leadership. He had first made his mark as the Cold War was coming to an end. His internationalist outlook and ease among his fellow man, whether Soviet military leader or precocious Ivy League undergraduate, opened doors that had been closed for many years. One such military leader was General Yuri Kirshin, who in 1992 paved the way for Zacharias to speak at the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow. Zacharias saw the cost of enforced atheism in the Soviet Union; the abandonment of religion had created the illusion of power and the reality of self-destruction. A year later, Zacharias traveled to Colombia, where he spoke to members of the judiciary on the necessity of a moral framework to make sense of the incoherent worldview that had taken hold in the South American nation. Zacharias’s standing on the world stage spanned the continents and the decades. In January 2020, as part of his final foreign trip, he was invited by eight division world champion boxer and Philippines Senator Manny Pacquiao to speak at the National Bible Day Prayer Breakfast in Manila. It was an invitation that followed Zacharias’s November 2019 appearance at The National Theatre in Abu Dhabi as part of the United Arab Emirates’ Year of Tolerance. In 1992, Zacharias’s apologetics ministry expanded from the political arena to academia with the launching of the first ever Veritas Forum, hosted on the campus of Harvard University. Zacharias was asked to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural event. The lectures Zacharias delivered that weekend would form the basis of the best-selling book, Can Man Live Without God?, and would open up opportunities to speak at university campuses across the world. The invitations that followed exposed Zacharias to the intense longing of young people for meaning and identity. Twenty-eight years after that first Veritas Forum event, in what would prove to be his last speaking engagement, Zacharias spoke to a crowd of over 7,000 at the University of Miami’s Watsco Center on the subject of “Does God Exist?” It is a question also asked behind the walls of Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Zacharias had prayed with prisoners of war all those years ago in Vietnam but walking through Death Row left an even deeper impression. Zacharias believed the gospel shined with grace and power, especially in the darkest places, and praying with those on Death Row “makes it impossible to block the tears.” It was his third visit to Angola and, such is his deep connection, the inmates have made Zacharias the coffin in which he will be buried. As he writes in Seeing Jesus from the East, “These prisoners know that this world is not their home and that no coffin could ever be their final destination. Jesus assured us of that.” In November last year, a few months after his last visit to Angola, Zacharias stepped down as President of RZIM to focus on his worldwide speaking commitments and writing projects. He passed the leadership to his daughter Sarah Davis as Global CEO and long-time colleague Michael Ramsden as President. Davis had served as the ministry’s Global Executive Director since 2011, while Ramsden had established the European wing of the ministry in Oxford in 1997. It was there in 2018, Zacharias told the story of standing with his successor in front of Lazarus’s grave in Cyprus. The stone simply reads, “Lazarus, four days dead, friend of Christ.” Zacharias turned to Ramsden and said if he was remembered as “a friend of Christ, that would be all I want.” =====|||=====

Ravi Zacharias, who died of cancer on May 19, 2020, at age 74, is survived by Margie, his wife of 48-years; his three children: Sarah, the Global CEO of RZIM, Naomi, Director of Wellspring International, and Nathan, RZIM’s Creative Director for Media; and five grandchildren. =====|||=====

By Matthew Fearon, RZIM UK content manager and former journalist with The Sunday Times of London

Margie and the Zacharias family have asked that in lieu of flowers gifts be made to the ongoing work of RZIM. Ravi’s heart was people.

His passion and life’s work centered on helping people understand the beauty of the gospel message of salvation.

Our prayer is that, at his passing, more people will come to know the saving grace found in Jesus through Ravi’s legacy and the global team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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How One Bahamian Town, Nearly Destroyed, Is Coping After Dorian https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/world/americas/bahamas-abaco-hurricane-damage.html

How One Bahamian Town, Nearly Destroyed, Is Coping After Dorian

By Kirk Semple |Published Sept. 6, 2019 Updated 11:40 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 6, 2019 |

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TREASURE CAY, Bahamas — Since Hurricane Dorian plowed through Stafford Symonette’s house, and with it much of his community of Treasure Cay, he has stopped by from time to time to visit the ruins of his home.

What he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do, he said, is sift through the debris for his belongings.

“I am not ready,” he said softly, as he sat down on the toppled trunk of a palm tree.

Much like residents in other communities across the northern Bahamas, Mr. Symonette and his neighbors in Treasure Cay, on Great Abaco Island, were only just starting on Thursday to come to terms with the scale of their loss and to make sense of it all.

Evidence of that destruction was everywhere:the wasteland where a Haitian community once stood. A 45-foot shipping container mangled like a piece of aluminum foil. A Baptist church made of concrete blocks that now stood roofless, open to the heavens.

Some 95 percent of Treasure Cay’s homes were damaged or destroyed. The storm knocked out its utilities, leaving the community without power, water or communication. One resident was killed and others were injured, some seriously enough to need emergency evacuation.

“It’s going to be a long haul,” said Steve Pedican, 58, a longtime resident.

Since Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas on Sunday night as a Category 5 storm, at least 30 people have died and thousands have been left homeless. Officials fear the death toll could rise substantially once they have better knowledge of the extent of the damage on the ground.

[See Hurricane Dorian in Pictures]

Treasure Cay seemed to be facing the disaster with a resignation that some residents attributed to two things: a deep religiousness among the Bahamian population, and a longstanding familiarity with hurricanes.

The community is in some ways typical of many others in the Bahamas: an amalgam of native-born Bahamians, mostly absentee foreign homeowners, tourists and migrants from elsewhere in the Caribbean, mainly Haitians.

The settlement, laid out on a peninsula scalloped with beautiful white-sand beaches, was created in the mid-20th century as a resort for foreigners, mainly Americans, residents said.

More recently, Bahamians have bought into the resort. Others live on its outskirts.

Treasure Cay’s population ranges between several hundred and several thousand, depending on who is counting and who is being counted.

Stephanie Hield, 63, the chairwoman of the local governing council, said about 450 Bahamian residents were there. But the full population can swell to multiples of that during peak vacation season. And if Haitian immigrants, many of them undocumented, are also included, the count leaps further.

Since the storm, residents have been doing a nerve-racking accounting, surveying surrounding settlements for their relatives, friends and acquaintances.

Lacking contact with the outside world and working phone lines, people have had to revert to word of mouth to pass on what little is known. On Wednesday, while waiting for the arrival of emergency supplies at a small landing strip near Treasure Cay, Ms. Hield, and Bridgette Chase, 50, a customs officer, compared notes.

“Everybody’s accounted for in Man-O-War,” Ms. Chase said, referring to a nearby cay.

“Everybody’s accounted for in Grand Cay,” Ms. Hield added. “Everybody accounted for on Turtle Cay.”

Though Coast Guard helicopters evacuated some injured residents earlier this week, the first planes carrying medical teams, volunteers and emergency supplies like water, food and chain saws began arriving at the settlement’s landing strip on Wednesday.

Scores of Haitians had flocked to the airport after hearing a rumor that there were going to be evacuations.

“We were told to come to the airport to evacuate so we could find a better place to stay,” said Kalisa Lubin, 21. But most were unable to get out.

Mr. Symonette, an evangelical pastor, was also at the landing strip. He had arrived at 7 a.m., driven more by faith than solid information, to wait for a plane he hoped would be sent by an American evangelical group. He sat on an upturned paint bucket, in the lee of a building that had once been the airport’s fire station.

The hurricane had stripped the fire station of its roof, and turned its contents into a jumble of furniture, construction material and office equipment. Trees surrounding the airport, like forests across the island, were mostly stripped of their leaves and leaning hard toward the West, raked over by the wind.

Private jets arrived throughout the day, disgorging supplies and volunteers, but not the one Mr. Symonette was waiting for.

As dusk approached, he offered to drive a reporter around the settlement. Since the storm, he had not ventured into town, staying mostly at the home of friends where he and his family sought shelter after the hurricane.

At Mr. Symonette’s home, he described how he and his family had tried to weather the storm. As the house was pulled apart, he recalled, they fled to an S.U.V. parked outside. But then the house’s roof fell on the S.U.V. so they shifted to a bigger S.U.V., where they spent the next few hours.

“It’s a miracle we’re even talking,” he said.

Mr. Symonette, who was raised in Nassau and moved to Treasure Cay about 50 years ago, drove through the community slowly, mostly in silence, occasionally pointing out landmarks.

“That was the primary school,” Mr. Symonette said. “This was a restaurant here. That was one under construction there.”

The landscape had been rearranged to such a degree, with one heap of debris indistinguishable from the next, that Mr. Symonette at times got disoriented, mistaking one cluster of homes for another.

“Wow,” Mr. Symonette muttered.

A group of men sat by the roadside near the wreckage of a Haitian community called Sand Banks.

“Pastor, how you doing?” one called out.

“I’m all right,” Mr. Symonette replied.

“Thank God for life,” the man said.

“Thank God for life.”

Mr. Symonette had one more thing to check out: the evangelical church where he was once the pastor. He had overseen its construction, which took seven years.

When it came into view, Mr. Symonette was visibly relieved. It was a tall, sturdy-looking building, and except for some pieces of roofing that had sheared off, it seemed to have survived the storm well.

Even the 20-foot-high cross that soared upward from the top of the facade remained in place, a fact that Mr. Symonette noted with satisfaction.

In Bahamas, a Blind Father Wades to Safety, His Disabled Son on His Shoulders

By Rachel Knowles | Published Sept. 5, 2019 Updated Sept. 6, 2019, 11:50 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 6, 2019 4:55 PM ET |

NASSAU, the Bahamas — The roof had blown clean off. Outside, the ocean surged, swallowing the land. Brent Lowe knew he had to escape — and take his 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and can’t walk, with him.

But Mr. Lowe had another problem. He’s blind.

So he put his grown son on his shoulders, then stepped off his porch, he said. The swirling current outside came up to his chin.

“It was scary, so scary,” said Mr. Lowe, 49.

Clutching neighbors, he said he felt his way to the closest home still standing. It was five minutes — an eternity — away.

Stories of unlikely survival have slowly emerged in the days since Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, pummeling the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco for days before moving toward the Atlantic Seaboard.

While the damage has been visible from above, the full human toll is still far from certain, with 30 deaths confirmed so far and the authorities warning that the real number may be much higher.

The death count “could be staggering,” said Dr. Duane Sands, the minister of health, who updated the toll late Thursday.

Some neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, almost entirely flattened by the storm. In others, 95 percent of homes have been damaged or destroyed.

Thousands of people are now homeless, taking refuge in gymnasiums or churches, and the authorities are bracing for an influx of bodies as the extent of the destruction becomes clear.

[See Hurricane Dorian in Pictures]

“We are embalming bodies so that we have more capacity as new bodies are brought in,” Dr. Sands said. “We need to get coolers into Abaco and Grand Bahama, because we believe that we may not have the capacity to store the bodies.”

Sandra Cooke, a resident of Nassau, the capital, said her sister-in-law had been trapped under a collapsed roof in the Abaco Islands.

At first, her brother couldn’t find his wife — then the family dog detected her in the rubble. When there was a break in the storm, neighbors helped free her.

“She was trapped under the roof for 17 hours,” said Ms. Cooke. She hired a private helicopter service to bring the rescued woman to Nassau, she said.

When Hurricane Dorian first made landfall on Sunday, Mr. Lowe recalled, all of its fury seemed to bear down on him.

The storm raging outside was one of the most powerful ever to sweep through the Atlantic. Its eye was approaching and the group of eight people inside Mr. Lowe’s cement house was particularly vulnerable.

In addition to Mr. Lowe and his disabled son, neighbors whose homes had already been destroyed were also sheltering there. Among them were two children.

As the storm howled around them, Mr. Lowe said, the roof began to lift off, then slap back down. Abaco withstood sustained winds of up to 185 miles per hour that day, with gusts that reached 220 miles per hour. The group sought safety in the bathroom, where they huddled together and prayed, hoping for relief. Mr. Lowe’s son was nestled inside the bathtub, he said.

That’s when the roof flew away.

Exposed to the elements, each person had to step out into the storm. They clung to each other and set out to find refuge.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life,” said Mr. Lowe, who is no stranger to hurricanes but said he could never have imagined the terror of that day.

The group reached a neighbor’s home. Mr. Lowe and his son hunkered down there for a day until a rescue bus was able to pick them up on Monday and take them to a shelter.

On Tuesday night, he was evacuated to Nassau, where Mr. Lowe can get the dialysis treatment he needs three times a week. His son had to stay in Abaco, in the care of Mr. Lowe’s sister-in-law, he said.

“I came here with the clothes that I had on from Saturday,” he said.

Although Mr. Lowe and his son are now safe, his ordeal is, in some ways, only beginning.

He didn’t know if his eldest daughter made it through the storm, he said. The phone lines have been down for days and communication with Abaco is very difficult.

“Right before we had the wind, I spoke with her,” he said. “I wish I could have been able to call and ask somebody, you know, because I really was worried about them. I was worried about everybody.”

So many people have been pushed from their homes by the hurricane that in Marsh Harbour, the main town on Abaco, as many as 2,000 people were seeking shelter in a clinic and a government complex. Officials warned that tent cities might have to be set up to accommodate the many survivors.

There are also environmental concerns. The Norwegian energy company Equinor said an oil storage terminal on the island of Grand Bahama had been damaged. The terminal was leaking, the company said, though it was too early to tell how much oil had spilled.

From the air, the storage tanks appeared to have no lids. The domed tops of five of tanks were “gone,” a company spokesman said.

Bahamian officials urged their citizens to be unified.

“There are no words to convey the grief we feel for our fellow Bahamians in the Abacos and Grand Bahama,” Dionisio D’Aguilar, the tourism and aviation minister, said in a statement. “Now is the time to come together for our brothers and sisters in need, and help our country get back on its feet.”

Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Lowe is now homeless. After a lifetime on the outskirts of Marsh Harbour — where he raised a family and worked as a butcher in a fish house until he lost his eyesight to diabetes — his home, his community and everything he built has been obliterated.

Still, Mr. Lowe wants to return to Abaco.

“I have to go,” he said. “That’s where my family is. My kids are there, my brothers, my sisters, they’re all there.”

But he is unsure of its future. The damage is catastrophic.

In the area where he lived, “90 percent of the houses are compromised,” he said. “I’m talking about roofs gone, houses totally collapsed everywhere.”

He added, “I’m just wondering where we’re going to live when I go back home, what I’m going to do.”

Death Toll Rises to 30 in Bahamas, as Stories of Survival Emerge

By Rachel Knowles and Frances Robles |

Published Sept. 5, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 6, 2019 |

NASSAU, Bahamas — Days after Hurricane Dorian bore down in fury on the Bahamas, leaving at least 30 people dead and thousands homeless, harrowing stories of survival have begun to emerge.

Sandra Cooke, a resident of Nassau, the capital, said her sister-in-law had been trapped under a collapsed roof in the Abaco Islands. At first, her brother couldn’t find his wife, but the family dog eventually detected her in the rubble. When there was a break in the storm, neighbors helped free her.

Ms. Cooke was reunited with her sister-in-law on Tuesday.

“She was trapped under the roof for 17 hours,” said Ms. Cooke on Wednesday, adding that she had hired a private helicopter service to bring the rescued woman to Nassau.

[Here’s how to help Hurricane Dorian survivors in the Bahamas.]

But officials fear that as the picture on the ground becomes clearer, the death toll could rise.

The death count “could be staggering” said Dr. Duane Sands, the Bahamas’ minister of health, on Thursday.

Dr. Sands said that there were already four undertakers working on Abaco Island, the largest island on the Abaco Islands, and that he did not know if more would be needed.

“We are embalming bodies so that we have more capacity as new bodies are brought in,” he said. “We need to get coolers into Abaco and Grand Bahama, because we believe that we may not have the capacity to store the bodies.”

Marvin Dames, the minister of national security, said at a news conference on Wednesday night that the process of clearing the streets and making airports available had already begun on the Abaco Islands and on Grand Bahama, the two areas of the archipelago hit hardest by the hurricane, one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record.

Aerial footage taken over the Abacos showed roads washed away and debris scattered across beaches. Splintered wood jutted from clusters of damaged homes.

Gaining access to Marsh Harbour, the largest city on Abaco Island, has been problematic, with the airport, Leonard M. Thompson International, left underwater for days after the storm. Like Ms. Cooke, other people also resorted to private companies to help in the evacuations.

A British Navy vessel is stationed near Marsh Harbour for relief support and has been distributing food and water.

There are no official estimates of the number of people displaced by the storm. But in Marsh Harbour, as many as 2,000 people were seeking shelter in a clinic and a government complex.

“Already we have begun the process of evacuating people from Abaco into New Providence,” Dr. Sands said. New Providence is the island where Nassau is located. “Those airlifts have started.”

He said some evacuees were being sent to the Kendall G.L. Isaacs National Gymnasium in Nassau, but that additional shelters would have to be identified.

Dr. Sands also said it was possible that tent cities would be set up on Abaco Island.

The Norwegian energy company Equinor said the hurricane had damaged its oil storage terminal in South Riding Point on the island of Grand Bahama. The terminal was leaking, the company said, but it was too early to tell how much oil had spilled.

During a flight Wednesday over the terminal The New York Times saw storage tanks that appeared to have no lid. The domed tops of five of its tanks were “gone,” a company spokesman said, but only three contained significant amounts of oil before the hurricane.

Oil was visible on the ground surrounding the tanks, but the seawater around the terminal was clear.

“Ahead of the hurricane we shut down the terminal as a precautionary measure and the terminal has been designed with hurricanes and storms in mind,” said Erik Haaland, a company spokesman. “The areas surrounding the tanks are also designed as barriers to contain oil spills. So far we have not received information that oil has been observed at sea.”

Some areas near the terminal had been evacuated at the request of local authorities. The company was still trying to establish a better overview of the terminal and said it was “mounting a safe and timely response to the situation.”

“While weather conditions on the island have improved, road conditions and flooding continue to impact our ability to assess the situation and the scope of damages to the terminal and its surroundings,” the statement said.

No Equinor employees were at the terminal when the storm passed. Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, said it shut down operations of the terminal at noon last Saturday in preparation for the hurricane. The workers were given time off to look after their families and secure their private homes, the statement said.

The storm made landfall in the Bahamas on Sunday as a Category 5 hurricane and stalled there for three days, inundating the islands and destroying homes and businesses.

In the days since, the storm has weakened significantly, and by Thursday morning was swirling off the coast of the Carolinas as a Category 3 hurricane. Residents there were bracing for dangerous rain, winds and storm surge.

In the Bahamas, officials made pleas for support and prayers from the international community.

He urged travelers to visit areas in the Bahamas that were not affected by the storm in order to aid the country’s economic recovery.

#hurricane dorian #dorian #grand bahamas #bahamas #abaco islands #world news #world travel #international news #uk news #u.s. news #u.s. military

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