Sean Connery is grateful to be alive after Hurricane Dorian stormed through the Bahamas.
The 89-year-old actor is okay after hunkering down in his mansion in the Bahamas with his wife, painter Micheline Roquebrune, PEOPLE confirms.
Connery gave an update on his well-being to the Scottish Daily Mirror after Dorian swept through the Bahamas and left “thousands” missing and 30 people dead.
“We are both fine,” the actor said. “We were lucky compared to many others and the damage here was not great.”
He continued, “We had been prepared for the storm, everything was ready in advance — we weren’t taking any chances and knew what to do.”
The former James Bond actor also celebrated his birthday on the island on Sunday where he and his wife were prepared to weather the storm.
While the two were safe, the same could not be said for others also living in the country.
“It’s very unusual for 20 percent of the population of a country to be very severely impacted by a single event like this,” United Nations relief chief Mark Lowcock said in a statement. “The Bahamas has certainly never seen anything on the scale … a disaster of such epic proportions on a single country in a single incident is very, very unusual.”
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Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Bahamas on Sunday, causing “extreme destruction.” Structures have been completely flattened, with as many as 13,000 homes destroyed, NBC reported, citing the International Committee of the Red Cross. The death toll is expected to rise as crews inspect the damage.
“The public needs to prepare for unimaginable information about the death toll and the human suffering,” Health Minister Dr. Duane Sands told Guardian Radio 96.9 FM, according to CNN. “Make no bones about it, the numbers will be far higher … It’s just a matter of retrieving those bodies, making sure we understand how they died. It seems like we are splitting hairs, but not everyone who died, died in the storm.”
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After ravaging the Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane, Dorian headed to the U.S. and eventually weakened to Category 1.
Dorian lashed the east coast of central Florida on Tuesday with maximum sustained winds of 110 miles per hour east of Melbourne, the National Hurricane Center said at the time.
Forecasters said Dorian could damage the Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina coasts, even if didn’t make landfall. However, the storm wound up making landfall Friday morning over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, as a Category 1 hurricane, bringing the possibility of a “life-threatening storm surge” and dangerous winds, the Center said.
“Get to safety and stay there,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said during a media briefing. “This won’t be a brush-by. Whether it comes ashore or not, the eye of the storm will be close enough to cause extensive damage in North Carolina.”
