B-Roll, Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Thanks First Responders Following Hurricane Debby

Earlier today, Governor Hochul thanked first responders in Canton following Hurricane Debby.

B-ROLL of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the Governor's remarks is available here.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

 Good morning, everyone. I'm Governor Kathy Hochul and I made a stop here today in Canton because this community has been through an extraordinary experience. And I'm so proud of the individuals standing behind me and the countless who are still out on the streets working so hard to restore this community.

It's been a really tough summer for New Yorkers, particularly here in the North Country, as we're still dealing with the onslaught of Beryl just 33 days ago, some of our neighbors in Lewis County are still suffering from those effects. But here in St. Lawrence - St. Lawrence is the largest county geographically in the State of New York, told that the size of Rhode Island. Imagine the scale of having to deal with the crisis of this magnitude with a volunteer fire department from a place like Canton. I want to thank every one of them for stepping up and giving their time and their talents and literally being willing to put themselves directly in harm's way to save the lives of their neighbors.

This has been an incredible team approach. I want to thank the local team here, our elected leaders, David Forsythe, our County Chair, Ruth Doyle, the County Administrator, Mike Dalton, the Mayor of Village of Canton, Mary Ann Ashley, the Supervisor of Canton, the Highway Manager, Don Chambers - my gosh, the highway teams have been working so hard. Matthew Denner, the Director of Fire and the Fire Coordinator, our State Police Major Brent Davison and all of the people who stepped up, from the local officials, the police, the fire, the county. It's extraordinary to see what this county has done and how they pulled together in this crisis.

And I also have an amazing state team. I've been in constant communication with Marie Therese Dominguez, who I'll be seeing down in Watertown shortly. The whole head of State DOT has been camped out up here. The head of DHSES, State Emergency Services, Jackie Bray, has her team embedded right here. Terri O'Leary is here and she's just in another part of the State. This was a statewide effect, but we wanted to make sure that we're bringing our resources and our efforts to these areas that are really hard hit.

This is all about what happened last week. We started Tuesday preparing for this storm. We had the warning. We started engaging our local emergency operations team so we would not be caught off guard.

As we saw on Friday, the storm hit. Especially during the evening, we had over 85 DOT personnel plus scores of contractors who are trying to deal with the fact that over 100 roads were damaged during that storm. You should see the photographs that I saw of what the damage looked like just a couple of days ago and how those roads are already back to normal and functioning. That is an incredible effort by our local highway departments, our state DOT, and others who stepped up.

We've had disaster recovery specialists from our state teams here as well as the swift water rescue teams literally saving people's lives embedded with our local teams here as well. We're bringing pumps and DEC staff to the wastewater treatments facility which I know is a point of vulnerability and anxiety for everyone here.

State Police stepped up and I want to thank the Major here for overseeing these operations on my behalf with traffic management using drones, state drones to be able to survey the damage. So, it's been an all the above team approach like I've never seen before. So, I needed to come here in person and just thank these individuals personally, tell them we are fully, fully engaged in this effort.

We want to make sure that homeowners know, we have scores of homeowners, people now displaced from their homes, mostly staying with family members, that they have available to them a state program that we put in place to help the people who do not have flood insurance be able to help rebuilding their homes and cleaning up the damage before the mold sets in. $50,000 grants is the maximum that people can apply as soon as possible. Contact your insurance company, get the denial, which I'm sure is going to come for those who do not have coverage for water damage. And we'll have teams on the ground here immediately from our Department of Financial Services to help those who do want to make insurance claims as well, our businesses in particular.

So, this is what it's all about. It's about New York residents at their finest being here when their residents need them. And I just wanted to say how proud I am of everybody here. The state here is not going anywhere until we can get this community back to normal and prepare for unfortunately, what is now becoming the new normal extreme weather, not just in the wintertime, which we're used to hearing more about, but now this appears to be a more regular, more frequent summer event. We've been hit hard this year. This is an extremely bad, extreme weather summer, is the only way I can describe it.

The month of July, New York State set a record for the [greatest] number of tornadoes ever. 23 in the month of July alone. Flooding, the scale of which we've not seen before - damage done to roads and infrastructure. We are going to continue focusing on building the resiliency necessary to help protect these communities when the next storm comes. Not if. But when the next storms come. So, I just want to give everybody a round of applause myself and thank you.

Contact the Governor's Press Office