Hurricane Tomas Hits Haiti

Hurricane Tomas was downgraded to a tropical storm early Saturday as it passed over the Turks and Caicos Islands, losing steam a day after battering seaside towns in Haiti.

Tropical storm warnings were in effect for Haiti, the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, the southeastern Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, although the warnings for Haiti and the Dominican Republic were likely to be downgraded later Saturday morning, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported.

Coming ashore at Haiti's far southwestern edge, Tomas slammed the coastline with 85-mph winds that killed at least four people with storm surge and rains.

It then flooded camps harboring earthquake refugees, turning some into squalid islands in Leogane, a town west of the capital that lost 90 percent of its buildings and thousands of people in the Jan. 12 quake. Two people were missing in the city.

Tomas turned streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, into canals of flowing garbage. The storm largely spared the city's vast homeless encampments, however, allaying fears that an estimated 1.3 million displaced people would suffer from high winds and rain on hillsides and in parks and streets.