ROTA, United States (AFP) — A “super typhoon” with the force of a category-five hurricane tore through the US Pacific territories of Northern Marianas and Guam on Monday, with authorities saying they had received reports of “major” damage on the small island of Rota.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said that the “entirety” of Rota was in the eye of “super typhoon Bavi,” with winds of up to 290 kilometers per hour before moving “ever so slowly away” westwards.

But the group of islands several thousand kms west of the mainland US was by midday still being buffeted by fierce winds and driving rain that left residents holed up indoors.

When the storm first hit early Monday, the NWS urged Rota’s roughly 1,500 residents on X to “treat these imminent extreme winds as if a tornado was approaching and move immediately to an interior room or shelter NOW!”

Local authorities on Rota — the southernmost part of the Northern Marianas, less than 80 kms north of Guam -- said they had received reports of “major damages,” but with communications difficult the extent was unclear.

“We are hanging in there. We are experiencing heavy winds and flooding here... Some people are already reporting major damages,” the Rota Municipal Operations Center’s public information officer Lou Rosario said.

Rosario added that some cellphone services were down because of a fallen tower.

Previously, the NWS had warned that a direct hit on Rota would make most of the island “uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer” with nearly all trees snapped and power outages for “weeks to possibly months.”

The island of Tinian, northern parts of Guam and the southern tip of Saipan experienced winds equivalent to a category-one hurricane, NWS meteorologist Marcus Landon Aydlett told a briefing on Facebook Live.