Sean Connery Rode out Hurricane Dorian in Bahamas Home

Sean Connery says he’s “lucky” to have survived Hurricane Dorian after it stormed through the Bahamas, where he hunkered down in his mansion with his wife, painter Micheline Roquebrune. Connery, who celebrated his 89th birthday on the island on Sunday, gave an update to the Scottish Daily Mirror after Dorian left “thousands” missing and 30 people dead.

“We are both fine,” he said. “We were lucky compared to many others and the damage here was not great.”

“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 continued.

While Connery and Roquebrune are safe, the same could not be said for others 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.”

Dorian made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in the Bahamas last Sunday, causing “extreme destruction.” As many as 13,000 homes were destroyed, according to NBC News, who cited 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.”

After pummeling the Bahamas, Dorian headed toward the United States and eventually weakened to Category 1. The storm lashed the east coast of central Florida on Tuesday with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm wound up making landfall Friday morning as a Category 1 hurricane over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, bringing the possibility of “life-threatening storm surge” and dangerous winds.

Photo credit: Jean Catuffe / Contributor / Getty