‘We knew it was going to be big, but wow’
Super Typhoon Yutu crossed over the US commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands yesterday as the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane, making it the strongest storm to hit any part of the US this year, the National Weather Service said.
‘‘At its peak, it felt like many trains running constant,’’ Glen Hunter wrote in a Facebook message to The Associated Press. Hunter lives on Saipan, the largest island in the commonwealth, which is a US territory about 6000km west of Hawaii.
‘‘At its peak, the wind was constant and the sound horrifying,’’ he said.
Maximum sustained winds of 290kmh were recorded around the eye of the storm, which passed over Tinian and Saipan early Thursday local time, said Brandon Aydlett, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries.
Tinian suffered a direct hit. Saipan and Tinian will be ‘‘unrecognisable,’’ Aydlett said, adding that the weather service received reports that Yutu’s catastrophic ripped roofs from homes and blew out windows.
‘‘Any debris becomes shrapnel and deadly,’’ he said.
Fallen trees could isolate residents and power and water outages could last weeks, the weather service warned.
‘‘Gonna be quite a scene when the sun comes up,’’ Hunter wrote to the AP.
It was still quite dark when he peeked outside and saw his neighbour’s house, made of wood and tin, completely gone. A palm tree was uprooted.
Hunter, 45, has lived on Saipan since childhood and is accustomed to strong storms. ‘‘We are in typhoon alley,’’ he wrote, but added this is the worst he’s experienced.
Power went out the previous afternoon and Hunter was bracing for months without electricity or running water. All government offices and schools shut down two days ago. A few gas stations ran out of gas by Wednesday evening, he said.
‘‘We knew it was going to be big,’’ he said, ‘‘but wow.’’
The roof flew off the second floor of Del Benson’s Saipan home.
‘‘We didn’t sleep much,’’ he wrote to the AP in a Facebook message. ‘‘I went upstairs and the skylight blew out. Then the roof started to go. We got the kids downstairs.’’
Recovery efforts on Saipan and Tinian will be slow, Aydlett said. ‘‘This is the worst-case scenario. This is why the building codes in the Marianas are so tough,’’ he said.
‘‘This is going to be the storm which sets the scale for which future storms are compared to.’’
Dean Sensui, vice chair for Hawaii on the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, was in Saipan for a council meeting. He hunkered down in his hotel room, where guests were told to remain indoors because winds were still strong yesterday morning.
‘‘From around midnight the wind could be heard whipping by,’’ he said in a Facebook message. ‘‘Down at the restaurant it sounded like a Hollywood soundtrack with the intense rain and howling wind.’’
Because he’s in a solid hotel, it wasn’t as scary as living through Hurricane Iniki in 1992, which left the Hawaiian island of Kauai badly damaged, he said. ‘‘The fact that we still have Internet access proves how solid their infrastructure is,’’ he said.