Governor Christie: There Is No Owner's Manual On How To Deal With Storms Like Sandy

4/23/2013 - Bergenfield Town Hall (Transcript Below) Governor Christie: Here's the thing: six months ago Monday, this coming Monday, it will be six months ago that Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey, and I can tell you that this has been the most challenging six months of my life. Think about this: when I woke up the morning of October 30th and I went to the Emergency Operations Center and sat down at the head of the table and said to my cabinet give me a report on what's going on out there, this is what they told me: the estimates were over 300,000 homes had been destroyed. It turned out to be 365,000 homes were destroyed. Of the 8.8 million people in New Jersey 7 million that morning were without power. There was not one school opened in the state of New Jersey. There were only 51 gas stations opened in the entire state. We were confronted with a situation where not one water treatment plant or wastewater treatment plant was fully operational in the state. When you sit around the table and hear that I can guarantee you there's nothing in the new governor's manual that covers that, right? There's nothing that you can look at and say OK, here's the way this has been done before. It never happened here before, and hopefully it never happens again, and that first full day when I went out and my first trip was to Belmar, and we landed the helicopter next to the beach in Belmar, and I got out of the helicopter and was greeted by the mayor, Mayor Doherty of Belmar. There were men in wetsuits who were doing swift boat saving of people from their homes because the water was so high, and I had a woman come up to me and I closed my eyes. I can still see her face. I'll never forget her, who said to me my house is gone. I've lost everything. Can you help me? And what I knew when I was hugging her was that she was one of tens of thousands of people who were confronting the same reality at that moment. 161,000 families were homeless that night. Now six months later we're now down to 39,000 families that are homeless, still a lot, but a lot less than 161,000. By Memorial Day weekend every boardwalk that was destroyed at the Jersey Shore will be rebuilt, every one of them, in six months. Businesses are reopening. Rentals are picking up again, almost to the levels where they were before. Roads are back opened. All of the things of normalcy are back. Only four schools are still closed, only four, and all four of those will be reopened by September. We've made a lot of progress in six months, a lot of progress. But what I will also tell you is I know we still have a long way to go.