Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
{wind and rain sounds}
I was very surreal, it was almost incomprehensible.
{music}
It was just like a calm serene, like a bomb just went off.
{music}
I mean the devastation was unbelievable. We've never ever seen anything like this
{Music}
When I came to the beach, I cried.
{electric saw sound}
You see the bulldozers out there and the sand trucks and piles of sand that were once
there are now kind of back to normal looking. Shoring up their beaches and getting
their boardwalks built and getting everything put back together before they do it.
You know, it just really looked like progress
Throughout the entire area that was affected there's a lot of reconstruction that's
going on. If you listen to the radio and you watch TV, by the number of advertisements
that are on about people being open for business and come to the Jersey shore,
I think they've made phenomenal progress in this.
The hope is to have the very active tourist season to offset those losses and I think
that the people of New Jersey will respond. Already on the Friday Parkway South
is filled with cars.
{sound of ladder being set down}
New Jersey had huge challenges for housing immediately after the storm and we stepped in
as quickly as we could to provide them with some help.
Fort Monmouth had a number of housing units that been vacant for as long as eight years
and a terrific amount of work was done and made them very, very livable for people who
are eligible to move into them.
The other success story that I didn't talk about with housing was the temporary housing
units that we brought in. 85 of those units that are ready for occupancy, 79 of
them are currently occupied. People are ecstatic to be in a place that they can call their home,
until they have their current housing solution fixed.
[construction sounds]
We had an enormous amount of debris. We have homes in the water,
we have debris that was strown into the waterways strown into our marshes.
If you drive up and down along the coastal towns now, it's night and day.
The piles that were once there are gone, not say that there still are piles but, for the
majority of those piles that you did see 3 months ago, they're gone.
[nail gun sounds]
We've come a long way, but we have a long way to go. We have longer to go than,
ah, that big part is done. We've, I think the big part getting that direction and moving forward.
I think we have the right people in place, I think that you know, it's gonna be a
process and it's gonna be just what it is, a long term recovery.
Not only is New Jersey rebuilding, but they have done a great amount of work and
study into finding out what it is that they need to do in order become more
resilient in their rebuilding. So, hats off to them for making those hard decisions,
hats off to them for making sure that those structures are going to be more resilient.
Music fades; Construction Sounds