B-Roll, Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Highlights Full Reopening of Metro-North Railroad

"It is a great day here at Grand Central Station. We just had the opportunity to welcome happy, happy commuters coming in on the Hudson Line, which is now reopened. What this area went through with a thousand-year storm event over the past 72 hours was extraordinary. And for these lines to be open, the Hudson Line fully open now, Amtrak now fully open, going all the way up to Albany is nothing short of extraordinary. And I wanted to come here today and talk about how far we've come, what we had to endure, and the resiliency of the system, the people and our opportunity to make sure we continue to deliver world-class service to our commuters.

I want to thank Janno Lieber, the CEO and Chairman of the MTA, who's been on guard every minute since the rain started falling to make sure that we could get service back to normal as soon as humanly possible. Catherine Rinaldi, you and your teams did an amazing job given that this easily could have taken not just days, but weeks to be able to restore the full service. And as I saw in the faces of our commuters who are now back to work here in Midtown, they are so grateful of the extraordinary effort done by you, our crews, our workers, the union workers, who were such an important part of this.

But let's talk about what we went through. We had flooding, we had boulders on the tracks, we had debris, trees down. There was complete blockage and stoppage of our tracks. And Janno can describe more in detail what the effect was, but this was an area that is vulnerable to these storms because of its proximity to the river and its position down to ravine.

So, what we're going to continue doing is monitoring, making sure that people are aware of circumstances because the last thing we ever want to have, is a situation where people are stranded on a track. What happened last Sunday, 300 individuals were on a train that had to be stopped because of the damage and the destruction that was wreaked upon the tracks. We had to work so hard to get those people to safety. They all received an opportunity to get transportation back to their destination. It was hard for these individuals. It had to be a frightening circumstance, but they all endured, and we were there to help them. And I want to thank all the emergency crews, state, local and county, who are there to help rescue these individuals as well.

We are also making sure that going forward our citizens are aware that they will monitor their cell phone alerts. They'll pay attention to the weather alerts because I cannot stand here and say this will be the last time that we have in a weather event like we just went through. As I walk the streets, the lower Hudson Valley, the streets of Orange County, all the way up to Ontario County, the devastation we saw because of unprecedented rain -- nine inches in a matter of hours was extraordinary. Thank God the storm moved on and I've spoke to the Governor of Vermont yesterday to offer our assistance because unfortunately, we are very skilled in having to deal with storms of this magnitude.

But once again, today is about returning to normal. To all the commuters who's had their lives disrupted as we had to work furiously through day and night to get the tracks restored to normal levels, I want to thank them for their patience. I want to thank all the businesses who were disrupted during this period. But as I was saying, this could have been such a longer process, and people did not anticipate that not just the Hudson Line, where we just greeted visitors and our commuters today, but also Amtrak. No one could have foreseen that it'd be open on the Wednesday after this horrific storm over the past few days. So, I'm grateful. Grateful to everybody who has involved in this Herculean effort, and I want to turn it over to Janno Lieber and thank him for all he has done as well. Thank you.

So, you got the word. The trains are back and under normal circumstances. This is quite extraordinary, and Cathy Rinaldi gets a lot of credit for this. These trains have been running 97 percent on time except for when there's a thousand-year weather event. So, I want to commend you once again for doing what we have all thought was so important, is giving reliability and exceptional service to our commuters and our customers."

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