Guam is Okay, Tinian and Saipan are Not (Patreon)

So, I'm doing fine here on Guam. Conditions stayed mostly tropical storm strength here, and with the storms earlier this year it seems a lot of the "weakest links" in the utility grids were already knocked out and repaired. We only had a brief power outage in my area, and overall have been extremely lucky.

I work for the federal government (in case you didn't know), so we've all been quite busy for the last 48 hours, with more of that to come. Today though, I finished all the base code for putting NPCs (and expandable simple NPCs) into the world, so we're still doing well.

Our neighbors up north didn't fair so well. Tinian got the brunt of the storm, but the island has a fairly small population. Saipan also was hit pretty hard. The extremely high wind speeds caused a lot of damage. The estimated sustained wind speed reached 210mph / 338kph based on fancy meteorologist stuff, but a anemometer (wind-speed meter) on saipan showed 188mph before being destroyed. And now that the damage is done, the storm has been quickly weakening...

The storm is the world's strongest for the year, and also the strongest tropical cyclone winds to hit U.S. soil this century, and some indeterminate number of decades prior. Fortunately the building code requirements for reinforced concrete buildings kept the fatalities remarkably low, with only one confirmed death so far. There were still a lot of injuries, however. Lack of power and communication makes information somewhat scarce, but news from Saipan states that the island is without electricity, running water, and sewage. There is gasoline and diesel on the island, but all the gas station pumps were torn away from the ground, so there currently isn't a proper way to obtain new fuel. The island's grocery stores were heavily damaged as well, so food supplies will be quite limited. 

Fortunately relief efforts are underway (part of the reason it's so busy here), but it's still going to be pretty awful for our neighbors up there. Based on the last storm, and the simple difficulty and expense of shipping in supplies, it may take a year or more for them to recover from this storm.