Transcript:

Governor Christie: The recovery from Hurricane Sandy continues. Now I’d say we’re probably about 85 percent done now. We’ve probably got about 1,000 families left to get back in their homes which is pretty good given we started at 365,000 homes and we still have some businesses who we hope reopen but not many, most of them that are going to reopen have reopened and most of them did reopen because of the programs that we stood on. But the better part of that story is the preparation for next time whatever next time brings us. I don’t think we’ll again have a situation where we’ll have no operational water treatment or wastewater treatment plants in the state because we’ve now built and are building electric grids in all those places so that if the power goes out at the main grid those treatment plants can continue to provide clean water for people, and treat wastewater so that no Governor in the future is getting confronted with the decision that Bob Martin and I were confronted with of millions of gallons of wastewater having to be dumped into rivers in this state because there was no place to go because there was no power to run the wastewater treatment plants around the state. That so many of our trauma center across the state that didn’t have backup power available to them do now because of the BPU and the EDA’s energy resilience program. And they’re building those grids at trauma centers across the country, across the state rather, and that will provide great care for the people who have to be treated in those trauma centers as a result of injuries from whatever disaster we had, and those people who are already being treated there. We don’t want to see what we’ve seen happen in other states and we didn’t see happen here and we won’t in the future of people who are dying because they can’t have power to give them the treatment they need for whatever they’re suffering from at that time. Our roads are more resilient and rebuilt in a more resilient way, we now will finally will  finish the project building a dune system, protective dune system, from Cape May to Sandy Hook and so that our beach front will be protected again in the way where we won’t see what we saw in Mantoloking, what we saw in Bayhead, what we saw in other parts of this state. And it’s important to remember that all throughout this we fought for the people of this state. Our Department of Banking and Insurance fighting for the insureds across the state to make sure they got their insurance money from their insurance companies and fighting with Federal Government to make sure that they pay their National Flood Insurance plans. Setting up an arbitration system to make sure that that was fair, building new affordable housing throughout the state so they’re will be more of that available for folks. All of that was done because we went down and we fought in Congress and at the White House to make sure that New Jersey was not short changed in reaction to this disaster because of the mistakes of the past in Louisiana and Mississippi from Katrina.