The family decided to spend Sunday night at Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion in Princeton because they weren't sure if they'd get power back
TRENTON — Candles, board games and frozen pizza cooked outside on a gas grill. That’s how Gov. Chris Christie and his family coped when the power went out at their Mendham home during the weekend snowstorm.
The Christies’ home was one of more than 700,000 without power in New Jersey on Saturday night, and the governor said they toughed it out as the needle dropped to 47 degrees in their house.
"We stayed home. We built a fire," he said at a Statehouse press conference today. "There was a lot of reading going on. There was some board game playing. There was some card playing that went on."
That doesn’t mean being without power was enjoyable. "It stinks," the governor said on the radio today morning.
Christie said they lost power after 3 p.m. that afternoon and the family started lighting candles until his younger son Patrick found the flashlights.
For food, his wife, Mary Pat, and his older daughter, Sarah, cooked frozen pizza on their outdoor gas grill because they couldn’t cook in the house without electricity.
"A little burnt, but you know, given the obstacles they were up against, I think they did pretty well," Christie said. "None of us were complaining, we were all eating."
Even the State Police, posted in a trailer on the Christie property to provide security, lost power on Saturday.
When the Christies woke up on Sunday morning, the power was still out. The governor went to a Giants game with his two sons, Andrew and Patrick, while Mary Pat went to the library with their daughters, Sarah and Bridget.
Unsure if they were going to get power back at their Mendham home on Sunday, they decided to spend the night at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton.
But in a "richly ironic" twist, Christie said, they lost electricity at Drumthwacket even as the power came back at their Mendham home.
"The area that the governor lives in experienced an outage based upon the fact that the power sources serving that area were taken out of service," said Ron Morano, a spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light.
He explained that Christie "was one of many customers who we brought back when we got that power source fixed."
Christie had his own take. He joked that the Board of Public Utilities president, Lee Solomon, may have been playing a trick on him.
"Knowing Lee’s sense of humor, he might of been pushing the circuit breaker himself," he said.
A small generator at Drumthwacket kept the heat on, and after an hour the power was fully restored, Christie said.
"We were warm last night," he said.
Not everyone has been so lucky. As of 6 last night, more than 86,000 people were without power in Morris County, where Christie lives, and 385,000 PSE&G and JCP&L customers in the state still had no electricity.
Related coverage:
• 95 percent of homes will have power restored by Thursday, Gov. Christie says
• Gov. Christie says cleanup after snowstorm is worse than cleanup after Hurricane Irene