Super Typhoon Ioke: 'Will Destroy Everything'

Super Typhoon Ioke Update 3 - Super Typhoon Ioke has maintained its strength and will slam into Wake Island on Thursday with astonishing force, forecasters predict. 

Super Typhoon Ioke Wed 12p Update (Image: NOAA)

Forecasters expect the Category 5 typhoon to hit the island on Thursday.

Wake Island is halfway between Hawaii and Japan, and is both a scientific outpost and a midpoint air base for Air Force jets flying across the Pacific Ocean.

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Forecasters say the storm is predicted to submerge the two-and-a-half-square-mile atoll and 'destroy everything' on the island that isn't concrete.

National Weather Service lead forecaster Jeff Powell calls it "a monster storm.''

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NOAA update-

-- NOAA reports that maximum sustained winds are now 160mph and Ioke is expected to maintain that strength for the next 12 hours. Gusts of up to 189 miles per hour are also expected.

--Ioke is the first Category 5 typhoon to hit the Pacific since 1994 and the fifth on record. It is unofficially holding the record for lowest pressure in the Central Pacific at this point.

--Typhoon force winds will extend outward up to 75 miles from the center, according to NOAA and tropical storm force winds will extend outward up to 155 miles.

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The small island some 2,300 miles west of Honolulu, Hawaii, is expected to be severely damaged by the giant Category 5 typhoon when it makes landfall, reports Disaster News.

Some believe the island could be completely wiped out.

One note: The island has been evacuated and all of the evacuees were flown to Oahu. No permanent residents live on the island. The evacuees were all military contractors.

--Jeff Freeland writes from Texas