FYI, I've been sent the following info about Yap:

Thursday: April 15, 2004

COLONIA, Yap (Pacific Daily News) --- Of the dozens of people interviewed in
Yap over the past two days, not one could remember a typhoon that slammed
this island as hard as Sudal did last week.

The devastation is immense. All over the island, homes have been blown away;
nearly all vegetation is dead or dying; people have no place to bathe and
drinking water is not easy to come by. At night, the clear skies shine with
millions of stars because there is no electricity to light up the night sky.

More than 1,000 of the 6,000 people on the main island of Yap are living in
shelters, but the number of homeless people is much greater than that: the
most recent figures coming out of the Governor's Disaster Command Center
estimate that about 85 percent of homes are damaged or destroyed. Many of
the homeless are staying with relatives or neighbors; others are sleeping
without shelter on their properties.

Many houses were simply blown down by the winds, which reached at least 125
mph, said Peter Garamfel, public information officer for the Governor's
Disaster Coordination Committee. The generally low household income,
combined with high prices of imported building materials, means that most
island residents do not live in cement homes, he said.

Washed away

But in many areas, more damaging than the high winds were the floods.
Because the typhoon hit precisely at high tide, the low-lying areas of the
island -- including most of Yap's capital and largest village, Colonia --
were under several feet of water, he said.

In recovery

Yap's radio station, currently serving as the island's disaster command
center, consists of a room with a few desks, some computers, a few radios
and a plethora of cans holding the husks and red spit from chewed betel nut.

On the fifth day since the typhoon, many of the command center officials had
slept very little. In addition to members of the Governor's Disaster
Coordination Committee and the Peace Corps displaced from their normal
projects, there was a steady stream of FEMA, Red Cross, Army Corps of
Engineers, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. military officials moving in and out
of the command center.

Though the island's main water treatment plant survived the typhoon, there
have been major problems in water delivery to the homes that are still
standing because there is no electricity to power the pumps and because
water lines to the villages have leaks, Garamfel said.

Yap's power generator is functional, but the island is still without
electricity because most power lines are down, he said. The utility company
has fixed the lines to the hospital and to the southern Yap water system,
Garamfel said. The utility corporation has pledged to restore power in
Colonia by Tuesday, he said.

Telephones seem to be coming up more quickly, but because most residences
and businesses have major damage or have been destroyed, there is usually
nowhere to plug them in, he said.

Relief efforts

Air Force and Coast Guard cargo planes have been delivering loads of bottled
water as well as tarps and generators, and those have been distributed to
representatives from Yap's villages.

The outer islands also felt the impact of the storm. The hardest hit was
Ngulu, which had about 11 people on the island at the time of the storm,
Garamfel said.

He said a boat should be sent there tomorrow to deliver potable water, which
the island apparently has none of, but he said that with Yap's own water
problems, he is unsure how much aid can be spared for Ngulu.

FSM President Joseph J. Urusemal, who is originally from one of Yap's outer
islands, is scheduled to arrive on Yap Thursday evening to assess damage on
the island, said Garamfel. "I think he'll find that Yap is indeed in a
disastrous state."