Typhoon Sinlaku Batters Remote US Pacific Islands

Winds blew off the roof of a commercial building and broke tree branches in the village of Susupe on Saipan. A blue sedan was on its side.

Resident Dong Min Lee took a video of a car sitting on top of two cars in the parking lot of the apartment building below. The wind also ripped off part of the balcony railing.

“I hope people will care and help. The damage here is really extensive,” Lee said in a Facebook message.

The typhoon, the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth this year, packed sustained winds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h) when it touched down on the islands, the National Weather Service said.

Tropical-force winds and downpours also caused flash flooding in Guam, the southern U.S. territory that is home to several U.S. military installations and about 170,000 residents, the weather service said. It had previously struck the outer islands and atolls of Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia.

‘The rain was falling from everywhere’ “I would guess anything made of wood and tin wouldn’t be able to withstand it,” said Glen Hunter, who grew up in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, the largest and also known for resorts, snorkeling and golf.

Hunter, who has weathered numerous typhoons, told The Associated Press that this felt like the strongest typhoon yet. The rain was seeping into every crack in his concrete house, and he said he watched at least three tin roofs fly over his yard.

“It was a losing battle because it was raining everywhere,” he said. “No matter what type of building you are in, every house is flooded.”

Ed Propst, a former lawmaker who works in the governor’s office in Saipan, said he heard “crashing and ringing throughout the night.”

“We have not heard of any deaths so far,” he said, attributing that to residents heeding warnings to take shelter unless they were in a concrete house.

Ken Kleeschulte, acting chief science and operations officer for Guam’s National Weather Service, said winds of 121 kilometers per hour or higher are expected to continue through Wednesday afternoon as the eye of the storm moves northwest of Saipan and Tinian. Even if winds gradually drop to around 50 mph (80 km/h), they will remain too strong for people to safely go out for at least a day and a half, he said.

Sinlaku will begin to curve toward the sparsely populated volcanic islands north of the Marianas, he said.

The impact of the typhoon in 2018 is still ongoing. In Guam, where Typhoon Mawar knocked out power for days in 2023, US military officials warned personnel to shelter in place. The military controls about a third of the territory on Guam, a critical hub for U.S. forces in the Pacific.

Hunter said tourism-dependent Saipan, where one of the bloodiest battles of World War II took place in the Pacific, was trying to recover from Super Typhoon Yutu in 2018. He stated that the economy has not yet recovered.

Yutu destroyed 85% of Northern Marianas College’s Saipan campus, school president Galvin Deleon Guerrero said. The agency provided $100 million in grant funding for reconstruction.

“Just as we were finally starting to recover and rebuild, we came across this,” he said. “Climate change is real.”

He said he was concerned about people still suffering from Yutu’s post-traumatic stress.

Stating that he is Chamorro, the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, he said, “We are an incredibly resilient people.” “But just because we’re resilient doesn’t mean we should be exposed to it that often.”

Disaster declaration President Donald Trump approved emergency disaster declarations ahead of the latest storm affecting Guam and the Mariana Islands. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was coordinating support across multiple agencies and about 100 FEMA personnel were being dispatched, among other personnel.

Super typhoons are the equivalent of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane in the Atlantic and have winds of at least 240 km/h. More than 300 super typhoons have been detected by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Guam in the last 80 years.

Jason Nicholls, AccuWeather’s lead international forecaster, said typhoons are “very common” in the Pacific, but the peak season is similar to the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from summer to autumn.

“You can find tropical systems in the western Pacific at any time of year, like we saw this year,” Nicholls said. “But it’s a little unusual to get them in April.”