The areas where water facilities were closed issued boil-water orders, which required nearly 300,000 people to boil their water before using it, to make sure it was drinkable. In my town bottled water prices at the grocery store spiked almost immediately after the storm. State Governor Chris Christie issued a state of water emergency that limited the amount of in-home water usage and also non-essential outdoor water use was prohibited. The super-storm also damaged around 80 waste water-treatment plants, which resulted in the releasing of sewage into the Passaic River and the Raritan River. Passaic Valley Sewage Authority and Middlesex County Utility Authority were forced to do this to prevent sewage from backing up into houses. Hurricane Sandy also damaged a couple of storage tanks in Sewaren spilling 378,000 gallons of diesel oil into Arthur Kill, which is a major channel of the Port of New York and New Jersey. Several weeks after the storm, millions of gallons of raw sewage from crippled water-treatment plants have flowed into waterways, exposing flaws in New Jersey's wastewater infrastructure, which could take several years and billions of dollars to repair. Two United States Geological Surveyors, Marcia McNutt and Charles Crawford, stated that, "We tend to think of events like Sandy in terms of the ephemeral effect of the wind, rain, waves and even snow as it swept through our communities, but in fact this super-storm can have a longer-term effect in the large pulse of sediment and associated pollutants swept into our waterways" and that "Significant high water events are important to document, because a storm event like this can flush large quantities of nutrients, pesticides, and sediment into rivers" once these rivers and waterways are polluted it takes many years and tons of money to clean out these waterways to ensure that they are once again clean and near-potable so that people could start using them for recreation once more.
