Tomas a tropical storm after soaking Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Tropical Storm Tomas spun away from the Turks and Caicos Islands and into the open Atlantic on Saturday, gradually losing steam a day after battering seaside towns in Haiti as a hurricane.

A tropical storm warning for Haiti was discontinued but a massive gray wall of clouds threatened to bring up to 2 more inches (5 centimeters) of rain over parts of the country, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. Warnings were still in effect for the Turks and Caicos, the southeastern Bahamas, and the northern coast of the Dominican Republic.

On Saturday morning, the storm's center was about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Grand Turk Island, which lost power overnight when utility lines toppled. It had maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph), the center reported.

Emergency officials in the Turks and Caicos 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 though we would have had more rains and winds."

As a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, Tomas spared most earthquake-refugee camps in the capital but hit a seaside town that was nearly destroyed by January's earthquake.

Coming ashore at Haiti's far southwestern edge, Tomas slammed the coastline with 85-mph (135-kph) winds, damaged buildings with gale-force winds and flooded several towns including Leogane, which lost 90 percent of its buildings and thousands of people in the Jan. 12 quake.

Civil protection authorities said Saturday that at least six people were killed in the storm, with two people missing.

Reports have only begun to filter in from isolated mountain towns cut off by flooding. But as officials took stock and aid workers rushed to contain flood damage and a widening cholera epidemic, Tomas left harsh reminders of poverty's toll on the Caribbean nation.

"We have two catastrophes that we are managing. The first is the hurricane and the second is cholera," President Rene Preval said Friday in a television and radio address.

He could have included a third: the scores of collapsed buildings and sprawling refugee camps that still dominate the landscape 10 months after a magnitude-7 earthquake turned the capital into rubble. In the capital, Port-au-Prince, Tomas turned streets into canals of flowing garbage, but