Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Patricia Mazzei

The storm is likely to keep drubbing the island of roughly 51,000 people through Monday night, forecasters said, before moving on to the Atlantic coast.

“Tonight and tomorrow morning, we’ll start to see the pull to the north that we’ve all been anxiously awaiting, because we really need to get this thing off of the Bahamas and moving northward,” Ken Graham, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a Facebook video.

Geoffrey Greene, the chief meteorological officer at the Bahamas Department of Meteorology, said emergency management officials were not expecting to get verified firsthand accounts from the affected islands until late Tuesday or early Wednesday because the hurricane was still thrashing islands there.

“The storm is still over Grand Bahamas and slowly moving over the rest of the Bahamas,” he said. “This is going to continue to batter Grand Bahama and Abaco for the next 24 to 36 hours.”

But getting to the islands after the storm passes may be difficult because runways may be underwater, Greene warned.

He also cautioned against relying on videos circulating on WhatsApp, a messaging app. “Some people, they are showing stuff that is not the Bahamas,” he said.

Louby Georges, the director of international affairs for Human Rights Bahamas, said at least one friend had run out of drinking water and others had left tearful voice messages for loved ones.

Dozens of worried families posted pleas for information about their loved ones on social media after losing contact for hours at the height of the storm. The weather center advised people on the island to remain in their shelters until conditions improved, warning that it could take several hours.

Videos on social media showed water rising around houses and devastating scenes of decimated homes, with roofs sheared from buildings and insulation strewed about the floor.

The storm could still run ashore over Florida.

In Florida, forecasters continued to warn that hurricane conditions were expected across the state and the southeastern coast of the United States. A hurricane warning was extended to about 180 miles of the Florida coast Monday, and tropical-storm-force winds blew on a South Florida beach.

The much-monitored cone of uncertainty overlapped with nearly all of the state’s central and northern coast, meaning the eye could move over the eastern edge of the state during the next two days. Forecasters emphasized that even a minor diversion from the storm’s predicted route could bring the storm onto the coast.

“It cannot be stressed enough that only a small deviation to the left of the NHC forecast could bring the core of the extremely dangerous hurricane onshore of the Florida east coast within the hurricane warning area,” a forecaster wrote in a briefing Monday morning, using the abbreviation for the National Hurricane Center.

At 2 p.m., forecasters said the hurricane would move “dangerously close” to the Florida coast, beginning late at night and continuing through Wednesday evening. Then, it is expected to continue “dangerously close” to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.

Even if the hurricane’s center does not reach the Florida coast, strong winds and rain are all but certain to disrupt life in that region. Much of Florida’s eastern coast is also susceptible to dangerous storm surges, and tropical gusts up to 57 mph were expected to reach parts of South Florida overnight.

“It’s like being stalked by a turtle,” said Ben Foster, the general manager of Brother Jimmy’s BBQ in downtown West Palm Beach, in describing the long wait for Hurricane Dorian to brush the state.

Brother Jimmy’s BBQ was the only restaurant open in the area at lunchtime on Monday, and it was bustling with about two dozen people watching the U.S. Open and “SportsCenter.” A group of men played a golf video game, a respite from boarded-up homes.

Mayor Jerry Demings of Orange County, which includes Orlando, said 150 residents were staying in shelters in the county. He said the region would be hit with winds from the storm around midday Tuesday and its effects would last through Wednesday afternoon.

Rain from the storm reached the southern coast on Monday, and the National Weather Service’s office in Miami said on Twitter that the first tropical-storm-level wind was recorded at 40 mph at Juno Beach Pier just before 1 p.m.

South Carolina and Georgia governors ordered evacuations.

Officials in South Carolina and Georgia are growing increasingly anxious about the storm’s path toward their coastlines and have ordered many costal residents to evacuate. Dorian is now projected to approach those two states as a major hurricane, and strong winds could reach Georgia by Tuesday.

“We know that we cannot make everybody happy, but we believe that we can keep everyone alive,” Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina said at a news conference, announcing that residents in portions of eight counties must begin evacuating by noon Monday.

North Carolina’s governor also declared a state of emergency. State officials warned that heavy rain could cause life-threatening flooding between Wednesday night and Friday and that there was a possibility for tornadoes.

Norma Lemon, the owner of a Caribbean-themed restaurant on South Carolina’s coast, has evacuated three times in the past few years because of several hurricanes. She said Sunday that she was near tears at the thought of leaving her restaurant in Mosquito Beach again.

“It just feels like here we go again with this one, like it’s not going to be good, you know?” she said.

South Carolina could receive between 5 and 10 inches of rain, with isolated areas inundated with up to 15 inches.

In Palm Beach County, surfers ‘ride it out’ while others take shelter

As Hurricane Dorian’s outer rain bands moved over South Florida, the barrier island of Palm Beach, which is in a mandatory evacuation zone, felt eerily calm Monday morning. Roads were empty. Businesses were closed and shuttered.

Still, a small crowd gathered along the beach, staring in awe at the wild gray waves crashing onto the shore.

“I just wanted to take a look at this — it’s crazy,” said Brandon Atkinson, 40, a West Palm Beach resident. “You admire it for the beauty but know its devastation.”

A handful of young surfers braved the water, despite warnings from authorities.

“We’re not worried about the storm,” said one of them, adding that he had driven south from Vero Beach, Florida, and planned to continue driving south once the waves in Palm Beach got too big. “We’re probably going to surf all day.”

He encouraged his friends to join him, and they hopped onto the sand. “Come on — let’s surf,” he said.

Inside the West Boynton Park and Recreation Center in Lake Worth, Florida, PeggyAnn Cromartie sat with a pile of knitting as Dorian’s rains pelted the shelter outside.

“I wanted to be safe, because you never know what may happen,” said Cromartie, 72, of Pahokee, Florida. “It’s not really scary, but I thought about the flooding or the lights going out.”

She arrived on Sunday afternoon with her dog, Garfield, a 5-year-old Maltese, and shared half of a queen size air mattress with another evacuee. Dinner was a hot meal of chicken, rice, carrots and a bread roll, Cromartie said, and breakfast an assortment of cereal, bagels and coffee.

By Monday morning, the pet-friendly shelter was housing 75 people and 114 animals, including 75 dogs, 28 cats and several birds and rabbits. A sign posted outside warned that no livestock, reptiles or vicious dogs would be accepted. During Hurricane Irma in 2017, someone tried to come in with a chicken, said Yleana Arias, one of the shelter’s managers.

Randye Carol Pollack, 68, of Boynton Beach, Florida, brought her parakeet, Sweet Pea, and spent the night in a hard plastic chair by his cage, “to keep him company.”

“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said. She covered the cage with two blankets to keep him warm and said she was grateful for a place that would take them both.

Pollack planned to pass the time with a transistor radio and a magazine. Cromartie brought her knitting, crochet and her Bible.

Cromartie said she would pray for the Bahamas.

“God is very good,” she said. “He’ll see us through.”

A Florida utility company has assembled its largest response team ever.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has said for days that coastal residents should expect to lose power.

Florida Power and Light Co., which serves about 10 million residents, announced that it had assembled 16,000 employees and contractors and asked them to be ready to respond to outages around the state.

“We’ve assembled the largest prestorm restoration workforce in company history,” Eric Silagy, the company’s chief executive and president, said in a statement.

He added that the team would “work around the clock to restore power safely and as quickly as possible.”

As of Monday morning, there were no substantial power failures in the state.

This article originally appeared in

Hurricane Dorian Updates: Storm Batters Bahamas and Inches Toward Florida Coast

Downgraded to a Category 4 storm, Hurricane Dorian ground nearly to a halt with its eye just north of Grand Bahama Island, which was being pummeled Monday afternoon as storm surges rose 18 to 23 feet above normal tide levels. Forecasters said the hurricane was inching west at just 1 mph and turning slightly north as its winds swirled at 150 mph. It barely moved for several hours, and was about 105 miles off the coast of Florida, as of 2 p.m.

<h1>To make their college admissions essays stand out, high school students have always written about their biggest personal hardships. For those who have survived mass shootings, ducking under desks and witnessing unspeakable horror, the big question is whether to recount the bloodshed to get into college.</h1>

With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.

Students recall their terror. They describe their transformation from quiet pupil to outspoken activist. For those who are willing to relive those awful days — and not all survivors are — the tragedies are life-changing.

“I kind of struggled with that a little bit, because I never really knew what colleges would look for,” said Taylor Ferrante-Markham, who graduated this spring from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But then she learned admissions officers liked to see evidence of personal growth.

“Of course, it was the first thing that popped into my head,” she said of the February 2018 massacre at her school, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. She applied only to St. John’s University in New York — her dream college, she said — and edited her essay until she felt it was good enough to win her acceptance.

It did. Ferrante-Markham, 18, said she plans to study journalism and criminology.

Writing about that day has become a little easier over time, she said. Her essay recounts her feeling of apathy before the shooting and how the massacre angered her and made her look outside her own circumstances.

“I now care about much more than just my little world around me,” she wrote.

I hated waking up for school and going to any class that challenged me. My only concerns were my friends and our afterschool plans, boys, and how far away the next holiday break was. I did not care about what was happening in my community, my state, or even my country. All I wanted to do was finish my spreads for yearbook and go home or out. That is pretty much how my life went throughout the majority of high school. I was never expecting anything to change, that was, until February 14, 2018. ...

I did my research, which showed nothing has been changed to protect students. So I decided to walk in the March For Our Lives in Parkland with my friends, for our safety, to make change. I now care about much more than just my little world around me. I am ready to move forward onto my next chapter, furthering my education, bringing my new desire for change wherever I go throughout college, into my future career, and for the rest of my life.

The majority of college-bound students from Stoneman Douglas who were juniors at the time of the mass shooting wrote about it in their college admission essays, according to Sarah Lerner, an English and journalism teacher at the school who taught many of those students in their senior year.

“Some of the kids didn’t want to write about the event because it was too much already, but others did, because it truly shaped them and they wanted to talk about it,” said Lerner, who compiled stories from shooting survivors into a book. “I was very honest with them. I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t. Nobody is going to accept you because you write about it or not.’”

One Stoneman Douglas student who wrote about surviving the massacre was accepted to Harvard in the spring only to have his acceptance rescinded this week because of racist screeds he wrote months before the shooting.

Another, Spencer Blum, who moved into his freshman dorm at the University of South Florida on Tuesday, wrote about his fear on the day the shooting unfolded, when he initially struggled to get hold of his sister, a freshman at the school who was not hurt.

Blum, now 18, said in his essay that Feb. 14, 2018, was “the day I would become an activist.”

As we kept walking down this narrowing path behind the school, things started to become suspicious. For starters, we were still going; it seemed a bit over the top for a drill. Then, a cop car pulled up behind us on the field and came out in a full bulletproof suit and with an extremely long rifle. As some students began crying and screaming “THIS IS REAL!” the thought that this was just a drill began to fade. ...

Every morning I wake up and think “what if it was me?” Then, I think about how it could have been me. ... That’s why I lobbied in Tallahassee. That’s why I marched for my life. So I can wake up, hug my mom, dad, brother, and sister, an not worry about how it could have been me.

At Great Mills High School in southern Maryland, Alana White said she heard gunshots on the day in March 2018 when a 17-year-old student at the school fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and injured another student before killing himself.

Those memories came back months later as she wrote her college essay, focusing on the events that had shaped her view of her hometown. She wrote about suddenly not feeling safe in the tree-lined rural community where she had grown up, and about attending protests and rallies and working on a memorial mural.

“Whenever something bad happens in my life, I tend to keep it in and not talk about it,” said White, who is heading to Brown University. “I’m not the type of person who shares my problems with the world. Writing it down helped me come to terms with what I was actually feeling.”

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking for the whole day. I suddenly didn’t feel safe in the one place where I had spent so much time, where I had met some of my best mentors, where I had spent so long working towards my passions. Where a bright girl’s life had ended. My doubts resurfaced. But my community helped pull me up. Through our protests and rallies for unity, I realized I loved my school more than I ever thought I could, and that there was nowhere I would have rather become the person I am.

Imprints of school shootings are visible in other writings by student survivors, even after they arrive on college campuses.

At Northern Kentucky University, Mo Cox, 19, decided to write an essay for her freshman creative writing class about the day in January 2018 when a teenage gunman killed two classmates at Marshall County High School in rural western Kentucky.

“It was supposed to be 1,000 words, but I went over,” Cox said. “I kept writing. I just had to get all this out.”

She said she wanted to help other people understand the initial waves of shock and heartbreak, but also the lesser-discussed echoes of trauma: How she failed Algebra III, for the first time. The frustration of getting nowhere with calls for tougher gun laws. How people just stopped talking about what had happened.

Patricia Greer, the principal of Marshall County High, said that when they were applying to colleges, many of her students chose to tell admissions officers about their community’s success, not just its tragedy.

“We don’t want to be defined by the shooting, and our students don’t either, so a lot of times that’s not what they choose to share,” Greer said. “They’re proud of their school, they’re proud of the community for their resilience, but that’s not something they want to be defined by.”

Rachel Blundell, the principal of Santa Fe High School in Texas, said members of this year’s graduating class worked hard to reclaim their senior year after a 17-year-old shot and killed 10 students at the school in May 2018.

In her letters recommending seniors for college admission and scholarships this year, the first since the shooting, Blundell has made sure to mention their resilience. She said she has written about how student council members looked out for younger students. How the football team returned to the practice field just a few months after two players were killed. How students packed this year’s prom.

Jim Jump, a former president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the author of a weekly column on the ethics of admission, said he hopes admissions officers will not become numb to students’ pain.

“As more kids, unfortunately, encounter that kind of experience,” he said of school shootings, “I worry that college people will lose sight of the individual that’s behind that essay.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/us/college-essays-mass-shootings.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

College Essays Should Be Personal. For School-Shooting Survivors, the Question Is How Personal

With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.

College essays should be personal, for school-shooting survivors, the question is how personal

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Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Patricia Mazzei

Articles written by the author

Hurricane Dorian Updates: Storm Batters Bahamas and Inches Toward Florida Coast

College essays should be personal, for school-shooting survivors, the question is how personal