NASSAU, Bahamas – Terry Delancy spent the hot, humid morning yesterday cleaning up tree limbs and shrubs at his home and helping a neighbor repair a roof. Gusts of wind swirled the debris away from Delancy, and brief, sudden showers soaked his shirt.
But he was not complaining. He had lived through a terrifying 24 hours of Hurricane Frances, and when the sun came up yesterday, he saw mainly superficial damage – awnings blown off, shingles missing, and trees and power lines down.
“I expected worse,” he said.
That sense of relief was widely shared among the 320,000 people of the Bahamas, a chain of 700 islands.
“We seem to have fared considerably better than we first anticipated,” said Bradley B. Roberts, minister of works and utilities. “This was billed as the largest hurricane ever to hit the Bahamas.”
But Roberts and other government officials said they feared worse was to come as the tail end of the hurricane continued to lash the northernmost islands of the Bahamas.
For several hours yesterday, the hurricane hovered over Grand Bahama, a gambling and beach resort about 70 miles east of Palm Beach, Fla., with its sprawling winds thrashing nearby Abaco, one of the larger northern islands.
At least one person drowned and another was missing and presumed dead yesterday as rescue workers struggled to evacuate holdouts. The deaths were the second and third attributed to Frances in the Bahamas. A teenager in Nassau was electrocuted Friday.
Police said people were marooned in the flooded neighborhoods of Freeport, appealing to any others remaining in low-lying areas to evacuate. Several neighborhoods were underwater and thousands had been driven from their homes.
While the damage so far has not been staggering, one company that specializes in assessing losses in disasters, Air Worldwide in Boston, estimated it would cost at least $100 million for reconstruction in the Bahamas and possibly tens of millions more if damage is heavy in Grand Bahama and Abaco.
Roberts said that while perhaps 75 percent of residents lost electricity, service would be restored within a week.
