Super Typhoon Bavi struck the tiny island of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands on Monday, battering the US Pacific territory with winds of up to 290 kilometres per hour — equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane — and bringing torrential rain, flooding and reports of widespread destruction. The storm poses an imminent danger to life, according to the US National Weather Service (NWS), which urged residents to treat the extreme winds "as if a tornado was approaching" and move immediately to interior rooms away from windows.

Rota, the southernmost inhabited island of the Northern Mariana Islands archipelago and home to roughly 1,500 people, took a direct hit as the eye of the typhoon passed over it. Lou Rosario, a public information officer at the Rota Municipal Operations Centre, confirmed that residents were already reporting "major damages" and that some cellphone service had gone down due to a fallen tower. "We are hanging in there. We are experiencing heavy winds and flooding," Rosario said. Before landfall, the NWS had warned starkly that a direct hit on Rota could render most of the island "uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer," with non-reinforced homes facing total roof failure and wall collapse, and power outages potentially lasting months. On Saipan, the largest island in the archipelago and located to the north of Rota, wind gusts of more than 161 km/h were recorded at the airport. Typhoon and flash flood warnings were also in effect for Guam — a sun-soaked US tourist destination in the western Pacific with a population of around 170,000 — as well as for nearby Tinian island.

The timing of the storm is particularly punishing. Many residents of Saipan and Tinian had already been without power since Super Typhoon Sinlaku struck the same region in April, killing 17 people and causing approximately $1.5 billion in damage. Guam opened five evacuation centres in schools ahead of Bavi's arrival, though at least one reached maximum capacity on Sunday afternoon. The NWS warned that winds would not drop below typhoon force until early afternoon on Monday, and below tropical storm force until after midnight. The storm is expected to dump at least 51 centimetres of rain across the region before it passes.

The back-to-back super typhoons are drawing attention to broader climate dynamics. Warmer ocean temperatures allow tropical storms to intensify more rapidly and carry greater moisture. The World Meteorological Organisation warned last Friday that El Niño — a natural climate phenomenon that warms surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific and alters global weather patterns — has already begun and is likely to be strong this cycle. The Northern Mariana Islands and Guam together are home to around 210,000 people, and the cumulative toll of successive powerful storms on infrastructure, housing and daily life is becoming an acute humanitarian concern for these remote US territories.