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<\/a>\nAsked for an update on repairs yesterday, IT&E sales and marketing manager Hans Mickelson said that they would probably have \u201cgood news\u201d in the morning and that weather conditions for repairs were good.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are making progress\u2026If everything goes [well] tonight, everybody should see a marked difference in data\u201d services in the morning, Mickelson told Saipan Tribune.<\/p>\n
PTI chief executive officer Jim Oehlerking announced the start to repairs in a press conference on Friday. PTI is the parent company of IT&E.<\/p>\n
Oehlerking told reporters on Friday that they were still looking at a 48-hour timeframe for repairs, before bringing back Internet to \u201cpre-cut\u201d capabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are going to begin hopefully on Sunday restoring full capabilities to different services. We don\u2019t want to disrupt the services that are currently in place during normal business hours so over a series of days between 12am and 4am [we will be] swinging back traffic,\u201d Oehlerking said.<\/p>\n
When asked yesterday, Mickelson described the damage as a \u201ccut to the cable\u201d caused by the \u201cmany years of being out in the ocean\u201d amid strong weather conditions.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Saipan Tribune observed the CS Durable off the Saipan coast near the Coral Ocean Point Resort.<\/p>\n
A restricted access tape surrounded the work site.<\/p>\n
CS Durable and IT&E repair crew and were seen working on the beachside. Divers and dive equipment were seen on the shore.<\/p>\n
A series of buoys, which appeared to run along the fiber optic line, was set from the shore to the repair ship off the coast.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Oehlerking said land crew were preparing for the termination of the cable. \u201cWe are running [the line] all the way from past the break point. We are going to do a cut and do a splice and take it all the way into the shore, and bring it into our manhole on the shore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mickelson said Friday that the CS Durable deployed a remotely operated vehicle in the water to go down and map out an area and route for the new cable.<\/p>\n
Oehleking said before the splice was done the repair ship would test the cable and make sure there were \u201cno other problems with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Mickelson, the ROV was traversing the cable line, but not all the way to Tinian.<\/p>\n
Repairs began after IT&E secured all necessary local and federal permits to conduct their work.<\/p>\n
Oehlerking said as they went through this process there was an additional requirement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that they did not think would be required but turned out was.<\/p>\n
The CS Durable arrived last Thursday morning. It is part of TE SubCom\u2019s global fleet of cable repair ships. It is a 140-meter long \u201cReliance Class\u201d vessel, specifically designed and constructed for cable maintenance and construction.<\/p>\n
Oehlerking estimated the overall break repairs would cost about $2 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The CS Durable progressed through repairs on IT&E\u2019s damaged fiber optic line over the weekend,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":206201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[6052,6148,6149,38],"class_list":["post-206195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","tag-pti","tag-reliance-class","tag-rov","tag-saipan-tribune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}