HANMI to assess losses due to network outage

The Hotel Association of the Northern Mariana Islands will be summing up the losses its member hotels have sustained from the network outage experienced on Saipan more than a week ago.

Separately, the Office of the Governor is coordinating with CNMI agencies, including the departments of Commerce and Finance and the Marianas Visitors Authority, on a damage assessment report of the ongoing Internet outage.

According to press secretary Ivan Blanco, the priority of the government right now is the restoration of Internet services.

He said service provider IT&E is providing the government with regular updates. As of the latest report, a repair vessel coming out of Taiwan is expected to arrive on island on Thursday.

“We are coordinating with the agencies doing the report, but we hope to have the reports after everything’s restored,” Blanco said.

According to HANMI chair Gloria Cavanaugh, “we haven’t been able to take a poll. I think that the biggest loss was with the credit cards.”

Cavanaugh, who is also the general manager of Mariana Resort and Spa, said that about 60 percent of their hotels’ clients use credit cards.

Aside from getting their credit cards back up and running as early as Thursday, Cavanaugh said Mariana Resort got lucky.

“As far as people go, I’m not so sure how everyone else fared, but with Mariana Resort we have a negative one room. One room, one night,” she said.

Despite cancellations, they weren’t much affected.

“Those that were coming in that got cancelled…was negated by those who had to stay,” Cavanaugh said.

Cavanaugh said that Homeland Security and Emergency Management also asked them to do assessment on the loss because there was a typhoon at the time.

However, she said it will be hard to do things manually without better Internet connections.

“We’ll wait until the Internet gets up,” she said.

Chamber not assessing

The Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, said it will not assess the losses sustained by its member businesses.

“That’s up to the government to determine. I’m sure individual businesses will take up their losses with IT&E if they want to. That’s their prerogative,” Chamber president Alex Sablan said.

Sablan added that what happened was an act of God, but despite this, IT&E still has to have a backup ready.

“It is an act of God. The cable broke, we got to deal with that, but we got to get redundancy up and the system hardened so that this doesn’t occur again,” Sablan said.

“We’re hoping that this doesn’t ever occur again because this is very scary for the entire community,” he added.

Finance Secretary Larissa Larson said there is no estimate yet—in monetary terms—of the damages but her department and other CNMI departments “are on top of it.”

Larson earlier said her department will soon formalize a request for “credit” from IT&E.

“We do feel that the disruptions to the Department of Commerce and to our department warrants it,” Larson said.

The call for the service provider to possibly offer compensation to the CNMI has since then gained support.

Attorney General Edward Manibusa, said people “need to be compensated in one way or another.”

Rep. Joseph “Lee Pan” Guerrero (R-Saipan) earlier said he is supporting the call, adding that credit should not just be given to government, but also to private business and members of the community. (With Joel Pinaroc)