Video, Audio, Photos, & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Updates New Yorkers on Statewide Winter Storm Impacts and State Agency Response

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul provided an update to New Yorkers on statewide winter storm impacts and state agency response efforts as a storm system continues to impact most of the state with heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain, knocking out power to more than 52,000 customers. Areas in the upper Mid-Hudson and the lower Capital District Regions received up to a half inch of sleet and freezing rain overnight, as well as a mix of snow. Western New York, Finger Lakes, Central New York, Mohawk Valley, and the North Country received up to a foot or more of snow with several additional inches of snow forecast through this afternoon. While downstate areas have seen mostly rain, freezing rain is forecast to impact the lower Mid-Hudson, New York City, and Long Island Regions starting this morning and continuing through the evening commute.

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

AUDIO of the event 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. It is February, therefore we're talking about winter weather, something that I have a little bit of experience with having been born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where we've dealt with everything from a seven foot snowfall in the course of two days, taller than I am, as well as many ice events. So I feel confident that we can handle this.

Also, I'm joined by some incredible partners of mine who have really been tested in the few short months that we've been in office. And I want to thank my dream team, Kathryn Garcia, the Director of State Operations, Jackie Bray, the Commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, Marie Therese Dominguez, Commissioner of DOT. As well as we're joined by Pat Ryan, the County Executive of Ulster county, and Steve Noble, the Mayor of Kingston, as well as Assemblymember Cahill and Senator Hinchey, who had a dig themselves out to get over here today.

But I want to thank them for being amazing partners here, as we continue through this challenge, and it is a challenge what we're experiencing right now. We are looking at ice accumulation. We track this event from the very beginning and we saw that this would be a major snow event and the snow has been concentrated in areas like Buffalo, where we literally had to send in extra snowplows at the request of the Mayor to help them dig out, which is important.

You can see the snow accumulations, but what is really treacherous, yes, while the storm is throwing everything at us, we have snow, we have freezing rain, we have icy roads. And so we were looking at this combination here in the Hudson Valley and Ulster County. Our biggest concern right now is ice on the roads.

The challenge is that yes, we have a magnificent crew of individuals who know how to salt the roads in advance to stop the ice from forming. But when the first weather event is rain, it washes the salt off the roads, and that creates a challenge, but they were literally deployed the second they could, they were out there and we're going to continue being concerned about some commutes. It's too bad it's not a Saturday, like we experienced with our last major snow event downstate was concentrated on a weekend, which made it a lot easier for people to get to where they had to go, but we actually encouraged them to stay home. No one had to necessarily get to jobs, as many as they would on a normal weekday here we are dealing with commutes.

And so our best advice is just to stay off the roads, they’re absolutely hazardous. And in anticipation of this, we have literally the DOT crews out there, you'll hear from our commissioner of DOT, through 8:30 they have been all over. Matt Driscoll is handling operations elsewhere in the state, as well as thousands of utility workers.

These are the people when the power starts going out and we have over 48,000 power outages, mostly in the Hudson Valley, I believe we’re at about 36 or 39,000, right in Ulster county. That is a lot of people given that the population is 175,000. It is a lot of families who are without power as we speak. We have already had over 550 utility teams on the ground, but now we have other individuals coming. You're going to hear about that as well.

Most schools are closed. That is the right thing to do. Certainly can use remote learning. We know how to do that as well, but we are going to continue to monitor local forecasts and preparing for the worst. That’s how we handle these storms. You prepare for the worst, you hope for the best.

And right now we do believe that the concentration of the weather activity will abate by this evening, which is good. But until then, it is going to be literally a day full of freezing rain coming down. We've not had major traffic incidences at this time, but that is always subject to one car sliding off and others following, or multi-car accidents, which we've seen happen all too frequently during these winter storm events. So the best place to be, at home, protect yourselves, and hopefully everybody is prepared at home with flashlights. Those chargers for your cell phones that do not have to be plugged in that you've already prepared anticipation, plenty of food and water, same thing with outfitting your vehicles.

You do not know if you're making that one run to the store that you're not going to end up in a ditch because of the icy roads. And you want to make sure that you are protected, get the sand or cat litter in the back of the car. You can help use to put that under the tires. It works every time to pull yourself out, but also just having the blankets, food, water in your vehicle during the winter time. That is the best thing, as well as that all multi-purpose scraper.

How many times I’ve had to scrape inches of ice off the windows. It's not fun, but it's part of living in New York State in the winter time. So with that, I'll turn it over to Commissioner Bray to give us a further update on what is going on here, Commissioner Bray.

…

Thank you. So you've just seen evidence of what teamwork looks like. Fighting a storm is a major event, it is a serious matter, and we're not out of the danger zone yet. And that is the seriousness with which we're approaching this, to let everyone know we have the resources on the ground but the weather is wildly unpredictable and we cannot foresee which limbs are going to come down when, and if you're in a vehicle and you're driving down a tree line street, you are at risk of having a tree limb coated with ice falling on your vehicle and creating a very treacherous situation for you. So please be cognizant of that as much as it does look pretty once the ice is on the trees, they will snap and fall. I remember one event I was participating in, we lost 13,000 trees and they were all over houses damaging roofs damaging driveways, and people's vehicles. And so please take that very seriously. I will say that, as we're managing this event, while the snow and the freezing rain are falling, there's something else that is falling. And those are our COVID infection rates.

So this is the good news. We continue to see a decline. Our 7-day average is down, the number of cases is at 7,700, down from 90,000 just less than a month ago, to have been down that dramatically, it’s just incredible. Mid-Hudson area, 795 cases, Ulster County down to 92. So that is the graph we’ve been wanting to see, we're very excited about these numbers, and are going to make sure that the those stay in that range, that is going to give people a lot more comfort as we go forward. So, very positive news about those numbers going down, our statewide infection rate, I’ve been waiting to say this, is at 4.4 percent. That is the statewide average, nearly a 19 percent drop from our peak just exactly a month ago. And our single highest one day was 23 percent. Again we're down to four, from 23 percent. Mid-Hudson is about 4.6 percent. So this is a very good trend for us, and hospitalizations, something you all know I've been monitoring closely, our hospital capacity, and we're concerned about, you know we still have national guard deployed in some of our hospitals and our nursing homes, to supplement the staffing situation which is literally a crisis. So many people were sick themselves, or left their careers after being under tremendous stress for the last two years. And so, we've had a shortage of workers, something I address in my budget, but also knowing that the number of people needing hospitalizations is going down, again, always the lagging indicator. Infections go down, people sick enough to go to a hospital goes down, and hopefully we'll start seeing the number of people pass away reduced to zero before long.

It's still 110 New Yorkers we lost just yesterday. So let's not forget them. Another milestone, you know I'm watching the vaccination rates, and adults have done great. They really have. Over 95 percent, and the reason we don't have an exact numbers we don't have always the number of someone who may have, over the winter, been in Florida, got their shot, their vaccination, at a local provider, a local drug store. So we don't have exact numbers. So we know it's higher than 95 percent, which is fabulous news. And I've always been concerned about our younger people. As different age groups have been eligible, 12-to-17 have been eligible since June. So been a while, but we finally hit 80 percent of them have gotten their first dose. Parents, teenagers, get signed up for that second dose, and then get the booster too, because then you'll have that full suit of armor that you need around you to protect you. So our focus is really to have your younger siblings do what you did, teenagers, and let's get them vaccinated, five to 11. We're making some progress. Our first dose is approaching 40 percent, but that's been eligible for a while.

And we're also waiting news very soon to hear whether or not our children, our youngest children, ages two to five will be eligible for this, and I spoke to Dr. Fauci just a couple of days ago about the progress we're making on that front. So we're getting there, but I would love to see that trend line of younger children more vaccinated as we start making decisions about schools. And that's something we get asked a lot about, when our masks coming off in schools. So we making some announcements you know and then in the short term as we see these numbers progressing, but I'm also watching vaccination rates. So that's a message to all parents and school leaders and teachers and influencers, that the more children we have vaccines the safer they'll be when they go to school, at the time we get to when they won't need a mask anymore, which we're striving for, but we're just not there yet. But let's know that there's a very safe way to get there. And that is getting more kids vaccinated.

Also, we have been so aggressive, more aggressive than any state in the nation in terms of amassing, acquiring, millions and millions of test kits. Knowing that people at home can find out if they're positive, if they're positive, even if they don't feel symptoms, they're still contagious. They stay home. That's how we've been stopping the spread. That's one of the reasons we're driving down those Omicron numbers because New Yorkers have been so smart about this, and I want to thank all of them.

And if you just compare, literally from March of 2020 when this started to November 2021, we had about 17 million tests kits out there, PCR and rapid tests. That's a great number. But literally, in a month, we amassed enough, we got them out - 23 million have been distributed. All part of our winter surge plan. Again, we started amassing upwards of 85 million, which we're still receiving every single week. We're getting another supply. These are really important for our nursing homes, to have them in schools.

My main goals have been keeping schools open. And when someone tests positive, we now have the capacity, we've been doing this since December, to send the children home with test kits. So, mom and dad don't have to worry about it. They can test their children before they send them back. This will be really important as we start heading into the winter break, coming up over the next few weeks, depending on the school district.

So, we're going to be making sure all the children are going home with test kits, so they don't come back if they test positive. So this has been an incredible effort. I want to thank all the state workers and the members of our team who've made this happen. It's been my highest priority to make sure we use all the resources at our disposal, managing hospital capacity, test kits, vaccinations, mask wearing, everything we possibly could do.

And that is one of the reasons why we are starting to see the snow clouds parting when it comes to this winter surge of the Omicron pandemic. So, we're going to keep using all the tools - getting kids vaccinated, wearing masks. And again, this time if you're not feeling great, stay home, the weather's bad anyhow, you're not missing anything. So we're recommending that.

And also it's time to start talking about our post pandemic phase or post-surge phase, because we did really see a major spike starting December 2nd, when our first Omicron case hit the state of New York and it went up very quickly, dramatically. You saw this in real time, as we talked about it almost daily. So right now we're in an information gathering stage. I've always said I'll make decisions on any of our requirements that we've had in place based on the data. Not by pressure, not by whims, not by just waking up one day and saying it's time. It is all based on data.

So that process has been ongoing, but literally, as I mentioned, I spoke with Dr. Fauci. We're talking to hospital leaders. I have calls with many leaders this afternoon to find out how they're feeling about the situation, the business community that's been affected, educators, as well as local government leaders. Bringing them all to the table as we start saying, yes, it appears the worst of the winter surge is over. We predicted that. Just asking everybody, as you're making your Super Bowl plans. Not that anybody really cares this year because… I shouldn't say that. But I'm going to care more next year when some of my New York teams are in there.

But, we tracked this. We showed all the points of vulnerability and that was in people that are gathering indoors. It was Thanksgiving, it was the December holidays, Hanukkah, and Christmas. Then it was New Year’s Eve. And as we approach Valentine's day, Super Bowl, all these other activities, this will be sort of the tail end of when we are concerned about this. So let’s be smart about it.

New Yorkers, I have to tell you, and all the business owners who've been following what we've been asking them to do, you are the reason we're seeing these numbers and I don't take that for granted. So, to everyone who had to enforce these rules, not always popular, you did the right thing. And that is why we'll be out of this before - we have the best numbers of any large state, which is what we're tracking. We're doing better because we've been smart. And that's why we'll be able to talk about this post-surge phase, gather the data, assess it, talk to my Health Commissioner experts, and then make some decisions in the next few days, the next few weeks about the requirements that we have in place to keep us safe and whether or not they're going to be as necessary.

So we'll be talking some more about that next week, but in the meantime, let's continue using the tools available to us. And again, thank you to all the men and women who are literally in harm's way, driving our plows, the emergency responders, utility crews, who are out there, all of them. We sometimes - you overlook them, you just assume they are doing their job, they are extraordinary individuals. They’re part of the New York family. And I want to thank all of them for what they do as well as our partners in government again. Senator Hinchey is here, Assemblymember Cahill, great leaders that we have representing this area as well. And to our County Executive, our Mayor and my dream team.

If it's Friday, we're together talking about the storm. So, all right. Thank you everybody, appreciate you coming.