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Carnival rides at Liberation Festivities in flux
In lieu of carnival rides coming from China, Skywalker Communications Group is now scrambling to ship carnival rides from neighboring Guam after the former’s shipment was cancelled due to back-to-back storms in the CNMI.
Skywalker Communications president Hu Bo announced in a press conference last month that carnival rides were being shipped from China. However, Skywalker Communications business director Elvis Yu said yesterday the rides didn’t come in due to the recent bad weather.
In the past two weeks, Tropical Storm Chan-Hom and Typhoon Nangka scuttled the 2015 Liberation Day parade twice and the Liberation Festival grounds only opened last Tuesday, July 14.
Yu noted that the first shipment of amusement booth games have arrived but are still at the Port of Saipan in Puerto Rico, being checked by the CNMI Customs Division.
“The amusement games are from China and Customs need to check the container. The first ship has arrived but the [carnival] rides from China are really hard to bring in because of the weather,” Yu said.
“We have spoken with Guam on the rides. They haven’t decided yet and we need to check the equipment there if it is possible and need to finalize and process everything,” he added.
Saipan Mayor David M. Apatang confirmed that the amusement games are in but there aren’t any carnival rides.
Apatang said that they will have a meeting today, Thursday, to finalize the whole Liberation Festivities and resolve issues as well as update preparations for the Liberation Day parade this Saturday, July 18.
The parade route from Quartermaster Road to American Memorial Park will be closed at 7:30am and the parade will begin at 9am. A total of15 floats and 19 marchers are confirmed for the parade.
