Coast Guard searches for 6 people after losing contact with boat following Typhoon Sinlaku

HAGATNA, Guam (AP) — The U.S. Coast Guard was searching for six people after losing contact with their disabled boat off the coast of Guam following Typhoon Sinlaku.

The crew of the 145-foot (44-meter) dry cargo vessel, named the Mariana and registered in the U.S., notified the Coast Guard on April 15 that the boat had lost its starboard engine and needed assistance, Petty Officer 3rd Class Avery Tibbets said early Saturday morning.

The Coast Guard set up a one-hour communication schedule with the vessel but lost contact the afternoon of April 16. A Coast Guard HC-130 Hercules aircraft was launched to search for the six people on board, but it had to return to Guam because of heavy winds. The search efforts were expected to resume at first light Saturday, Tibbets said.

The last known position of the vessel was about 125 miles (200 kilometers) north-northwest of Saipan, Tibbets said. The Coast Guard did not know the nationalities of the crew members.

Super Typhoon Sinlaku began battering the Northern Mariana Islands earlier this week, causing damage on the islands of Tinian and Saipan and flash flooding in Guam, the site of several American military bases.

The typhoon was slowly moving northeast away from the island chain Saturday morning, and the storm is expected to weaken over the next few days, according to the National Weather Service. Tropical storm force gusts still remain a possibility, the weather service said, and dangerous surf is expected to continue over the next few days.

The Homeland Security and Emergency Management office for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands issued a “hazardous seas warning” early Saturday morning for steep and dangerous swells reaching as high as 20 feet (6 meters) in the coastal waters surrounding the island chain. The dangerous conditions could capsize or cause damage to vessels, the announcement said, and those conditions were expected to last until late Saturday afternoon.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and several other federal agencies are ramping up their response to Typhoon Sinlaku as the islands’ shelter-in-place orders begin to lift, Robert Fenton, FEMA regional administrator for Region 9, which includes Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, said Friday.

“This is a very complex event, but we have a lot of experience and have worked very closely with Guam and CNMI over the years to prepare for these types of events and are well-positioned to do that again here today,” Fenton told The Associated Press in an interview from Guam.

Fenton said a slew of federal agencies are on the ground to support the local governments, including the Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, and more.

The storm’s sheer size — with typhoon-force winds extending 275 miles (443 kilometers) from its center, according to the U.S. National Weather Service Guam — was unique, Fenton said, and meant island residents were subjected to roughly 48 hours of fierce winds, delaying responders’ ability to assess damage and help communities.

“It slows down our ability to respond to those needs, and I think it’s more physically and mentally impactful to those that have to go through that,” he said.

The scope of damage is still being assessed, but significant impacts to power and water systems are already evident, especially in the Northern Marianas.

“We think this will be a multimonth mission of emergency power,” Fenton said.

The U.S. Coast Guard is “working diligently” to reopen the Port of Guam and the rest of the ports in the area but did not have an exact timeline, Tibbets said, calling it one of their “highest priorities.”

As the Coast Guard continues its search for the missing boat, U.S. Air Force helicopters would be used to assess needs in some of the smaller, more remote and sparsely populated islands of the Northern Marianas, Fenton said.

___

This story has been updated to correct the rank and pronoun for Avery Tibbets. She is Petty Officer 3rd Class Avery Tibbets, not Private Third Class Avery Tibbets.