Dear Sir,

The quality of radio broadcasting on this tiny island of New Providence is abysmal! We have how many hundred stations here? All they play is either horrendous noise laughingly referred to as “music” or positively ghastly “call-in shows,” please. Since Friday (October 7, 2016) I have been trying to find a reasonable news program to understand the current weather situation – the last I had heard was Matthew was going to loop back to the Bahamas and then there had been another weather disturbance following in the exact steps of Matthew, not a chance, I haven’t even heard a simple weather forecast and this, I thought, was the “hurricane season”! By the way ZNS is as bad as the rest, I did hear pieces on the southern Family Islands and some about Freeport, but this is New Providence, what the h*ll is happening here?

There have been some horrendous hoaxes broadcast on-line, I understand. I haven’t heard from the responsible(?) Ministries, either total denials as to their veracity or any explanations concerning the gist of the messages; the first was Clifton Pier was under four feet of water, excuse me but Clifton Pier is more than 20 feet above sea-level and I understood that any storm surge would be 10 – 15 feet …. ? The second was some evil cretin who thought it might be a good idea to scare the bejezas out motorists by posting that there was only a few hours of gasoline left and it would be about 3 months for reserves to arrive. The driving public appears to have gone stark staring mad, every single gas station that is open has queues of vehicles 30, 40, 50 cars long. What is the matter with these people? One large gas station owner told me “these people are idiots, we are flowing with gas, Clifton Pier is flowing with gas!” Also a little thought on the part of any driver would let him realise that even if New Providence ran out of gas it is only a 3-4 DAY cruise for a large tanker to get from Louisiana to Nassau. Further, on this matter, it might be a good idea for the Bahamas Fire Department to do some spot checks to see how many people are dangerously and illegally storing fuel on their premises.

We all know how Mr. Christie so loves to grab and hog microphones; would he please talk on these matters, and, Mr. Prime Minister, do you not consider it ironic if our Bahamaland suffers what some are calling the most dangerous hurricane ever to visit our shores and “thanks be” no deaths, but because of total stupidity, heaven forbid, but someone is killed in a fight over a can of gasoline?

Henry Owens
October 12, 2016