Reports of injuries after Super Typhoon Yutu hit the Northern Mariana Islands early on Thursday

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Super Typhoon Yutu crossed over the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands early on Thursday 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.

Yutu produced damaging winds, flooding and high surf and there were reports of injuries, though the extent of these is unclear.

Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marina Islands’ delegate to US Congress, said the territory will need significant help to recover from the storm.

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On the phone from Saipan, Sablan said he has heard reports of injuries and that people are waiting at the island’s hospital to be treated.

“There’s a lot of damage and destruction,” Sablan said. “It’s like a small war just passed through.”

He has not been able to reach officials on the territory’s neighbour islands of Tinian and Rota because phones and electricity are out. “It’s going to take weeks probably to get electricity back to everybody.”

“We’re surviving, we’ll get through this we are a resilient people but it’s just huge,” he said.

Nearly 200 federal emergency workers were in the Marianas to assist, Sablan said.

Maximum sustained winds of 180 mph (290 kph) 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.

“At its peak, the wind was constant and the sound horrifying,” 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. The Northern Marianas are about 3,800 miles west of Hawaii.

“Gonna be quite a scene when the sun comes up,” Hunter wrote to the AP early Thursday.

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.

“We knew it was going to be big,” he said, “but wow. This is going to be the storm which sets the scale for which future storms are compared to.”

