A super typhoon steadily battered a pair of remote U.S. islands in the Pacific Ocean with ferocious winds and relentless rains, shredding tin roofs and forcing residents to take cover from flying tree limbs.
Super Typhoon Sinlaku pounded the Northern Mariana Islands for hours before daybreak Wednesday, slowing just to inflict more damage across the islands of Tinian and Saipan, home to nearly 50,000 people.
In the village of Susupe on Saipan, the wind tore the roof off a commercial building and broke tree branches. A blue sedan lay on its side.
Resident Dong Min Lee shot some video of a car sitting on top of two others in his apartment building’s parking lot below. The winds also tore off part of his balcony railing.
“I hope people will take an interest and help. The damage is really huge here,” Lee said in a Facebook message.
Preliminary reports include a lot of flooding, uprooted trees and downed power lines, said Jaden Sanchez, spokesperson for the Saipan mayor’s office. There were no reports of deaths, he said.
Authorities were advising residents to remain indoors and away from strong winds, but Mayor Ramon “RB” Jose Blas Camacho was out in the community assessing the damage, Sanchez said.
The typhoon — the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth this year — was packing sustained winds of up to 150 mph when it made landfall on the islands, the National Weather Service said.
Tropical force winds and torrential rainfall also led to flash flooding on Guam, a U.S. territory to the south with several U.S. military installations and about 170,000 residents, the weather service said. Earlier, it hit the outer islands and atolls of Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia.
The American Red Cross and its partners were sheltering more than 1,000 residents across Guam and the Northern Marianas, agency spokesperson Stephanie Fox said.
“I’m guessing anything that was made of wood and tin did not survive this,” said Glen Hunter, who grew up on Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands as well as its capital, known for its resorts, snorkeling and golf.
Hunter, who has weathered numerous typhoons, told The Associated Press this felt like the strongest yet. Rain was seeping into every crevice of his concrete home, and he watched at least three tin roofs fly past his yard, he said.
“It was a losing battle because the rain was coming through everywhere,” he said. “Every house is just flooded with water, no matter what type of structure you’re in.”
Ed Propst, a former lawmaker in Saipan who works in the governor’s office, said he heard “banging and clanging through the night.”
“We haven’t heard of any — knock on wood — deaths so far,” he said, attributing that to residents heeding warnings to take shelter if they weren’t in a concrete home.
Winds at 75 mph or greater were expected to continue through Wednesday afternoon as the eye of the storm was moving northwest of Saipan and Tinian, said Ken Kleeschulte, acting science and operations officer for the National Weather Service on Guam. Even as winds slowly subside to about 50 mph, they will remain too strong for people to safely go outside for at least a day and a half, he said.
Sinlaku will start to curve toward sparsely populated volcanic islands in the far northern Marianas, he said.
In Guam, where Typhoon Mawar knocked out power for days in 2023, U.S. military officials warned personnel to shelter in place. The military controls about one-third of the land on Guam, a critical hub for U.S. forces in the Pacific.
Tourism-dependent Saipan — the site of one of World War II’s bloodiest battles in the Pacific — was still recovering from 2018’s Super Typhoon Yutu when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Hunter said. The economy has yet to rebound, he said.
Yutu destroyed 85% of the Saipan campus of Northern Marianas College, said the school’s president, Galvin Deleon Guerrero. The institution secured $100 million in grant funding to rebuild.
“Just as we were finally beginning to recover and rebuild, we get hit with this,” he said. “Climate change is real.”
He said he worries about people still suffering from the post-traumatic stress of Yutu.
“We are an incredibly resilient people,” he said, noting that he’s Chamorro, the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. “But just because we’re resilient doesn’t mean that we should be subjected to this on this frequent basis.”
