Acting governor Ralph DLG. Torres hopes to get a more extensive status report from telecommunications firm IT&E as discussions on a possible state of emergency for the CNMI continue.<\/p>\n
Torres said he and Attorney General Edward Manibusan continue to hold discussions on the state of emergency declaration but are waiting on IT&E for the report.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no update on the status of the repair, but they [IT&E] gave an update today,\u201d Torres said, referring to a press release from the service provider.<\/p>\n
IT&E said that aside from the basic communications services, customers can also expect a \u201cmarked difference with their Internet outage.\u201d<\/p>\n
IT&E said it is in contact with a repair vessel sailing from Taiwan. But the company did not specify any other details.<\/p>\n
Torres said he will \u201cnot want to act on it [state of emergency]\u201d until after meeting with IT&E.<\/p>\n
The Attorney General yesterday confirmed that talks on a state of emergency was brought up as early as last week when the massive communications outage started.<\/p>\n
He echoed Torres\u2019 comments, saying that a declaration will depend on how long the outage would be.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce a timetable is in, we can then decide what to do,\u201d Manibusan said, adding that he and Torres are \u201clooking at other alternatives,\u201d and if necessary \u201cpossibly declare something.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the AG, a state of emergency will give the CNMI government \u201cthe ability to mobilize resources and mobilize people to go to Tinian to do their work there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can move into Guam if we have to,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A damaged submarine fiber optic cable and a backup system that also needed tweaking effectively cut off Saipan from the rest of the world last week, crippling some critical services and industries on the island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Acting governor Ralph DLG. Torres hopes to get a more extensive status report from telecommunications…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[68,26,67,513],"class_list":["post-207907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-ag","tag-cnmi","tag-people","tag-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207907","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\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}