US territory in Pacific devastated

HONOLULU — Residents of the Northern Mariana Islands braced Friday for months without electricity or running water after the strongest storm to hit any part of the United States this year devastated the U.S. territory, killing one person, officials said.

Super Typhoon Yutu’s 180-mph winds overturned cars, knocked down hundreds of power poles and left one island of thousands without a medical center and another without an airport.

Buildings were reduced to haphazard piles of tin and wood; if a structure wasn’t made of concrete, one resident said, it was probably wiped out.

Yutu spent roughly seven hours thrashing the small islands of Saipan and Tinian, the most populous part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, early Thursday.

A 44-year-old woman taking shelter in an abandoned building died when it collapsed in the storm, a post on the governor’s office Facebook page said.

The territory will need significant help to recover from the storm that injured several people, said Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, the territory’s delegate Super Typhoon Yutu’s 180-mph winds left devastation in their wake in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday.

to Congress. He said Thursday that there were reports of injuries and that people were waiting to be treated at a hospital on Saipan, the territory’s largest and most populated island, about 3,800 miles west of Hawaii.

“There’s a lot of damage and destruction,” Sablan said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Saipan. “It’s like a small war just passed through.”

Sablan said he has not been able to reach officials on the islands of Tinian and Rota because phones and power are out.

Saipan and Tinian will be unrecognizable, said Brandon Aydlett, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

The Northern Mariana Islands are the most recent U.S. territory to have been pummeled by a strong hurricane in the past two years. The U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico suffered calamitous strikes in the 2017 hurricane season, and Guam was recently struck by Typhoon Mangkhut.