PORT-AU-PRINCE, – Tropical Storm Tomas spun away from the Turks and Caicos Islands and into the open Atlantic yesterday, gradually dying down a day after battering seaside towns in Haiti as a hurricane.
All storm warnings were discontinued but a massive gray wall of clouds threatened to bring up to two more inches (five centimetres) of rain over parts of the British dependency and Puerto Rico, according to the United States National Hurricane Centre in Miami.
Yesterday morning, the storm’s centre was about 115 miles (185 kilometres) northeast of Grand Turk Island, which lost power overnight when utility lines toppled. It had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 kph), the centre reported, and steady weakening was expected over the next two days.
Emergency officials in the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas said there were no immediate reports of significant damage, and islanders breathed a sigh of relief.
“I believed it would have been harder,” said 25-year-old Andrea Been, hunched under an umbrella in Providenciales. “I thought we would have had more rains and winds.”
As a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, Tomas came ashore in Haiti on the nation’s far-southwestern edge with 85-mph (135-kph) winds, flooding several towns and damaging buildings with gale-force winds.
It inundated camps harboring earthquake refugees, turning some into squalid islands in Leogane, a town west of the capital that lost 90 per cent of its buildings and thousands of people in the January 12 quake.
Civil protection authorities said Saturday that the storm killed at least six people, with two more missing.
In the capital, Port-au-Prince, Tomas turned streets into canals of flowing garbage, but spared most earthquake-refugee camps. (AP)
