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Here at Rockaway Beach one of the unique things we’ve done,
that don’t always happen in all disasters is the sifting of the
sand that you see on the beach.
FEMA approved this as part of a mission assignment underneath
debris removal.
We gathered the sand piles and brought sand sifters down there
instead of taking it off site, or we brought it over to Riis Park and
then we sand sifted it there and brought right back to the beach and
put it back on, instead of long hauling it out of there.
One of the big highlights of the debris mission especially in New
York City was re-use of materials.
The boardwalk was a very time consuming job, we took each plank
out piece by piece, screw by screw and was able to re-use the wood.
It was a hard wood that’s very valuable and we’d hate to see it just come out
mechanically and destroyed.
We are re-installing what we call a baffle wall which is the same kind
of wall, but instead of just putting a regular wall footing we are driving
piles 25 feet down into the sand, so that if we do get a storm surge,
if we do get those flood waters, hopefully this wall will function
a little bit as a barrier to keep the water away from the residences.
The Rockaway residents are working so hard to get life back to normal.
Rockaway was hit really hard.
It suffered a lot of damage; those houses had a lot of water,
a lot of storm surge.
So they’ve been working very hard to bring things back to normal.
And the mayor put the money forth and we spent $140 million dollars
out here to bring back and to start bringing it back
and we have a lot more work to do.
(applause)