Governor Christie Tells Utilities He’s Not Going To Take BS About Power Restoration [VIDEO/AUDIO]

Roughly 1.7 million New Jerseyans remain without power today. Governor Chris Christie says the Garden State has never seen a storm as devastating as Sandy so the standard rules for full power restoration do not apply.

Governor's Office/Tim Larsen

The Governor met with utility company bosses yesterday and told them they had better be thinking outside the box.

"I had the CEOs of both the local companies and their parents," explained Christie yesterday. "I made them all come in today and I( said, whatever your playbook is, throw it away."

Christie is anything but subtle and he joked that when meeting with the utilities he was his "typical charming self." He said, "One of them came in today and said, 'Well what we normally do….' I looked at them……I told the utility companies, like I'm not going to put up with you know a lot of b.s. about how long this is going to take."

The Governor hopes that by today about 15,000 people on the ground working to restore power. FEMA is airlifting crews in and he's spoken to governors from 12 states who are sending workers. Virginia sent 1,500 yesterday.

Federal authorities are setting up temporary housing for all the out-of-state utility workers. A little more than 1.6 million customers in New Jersey remain without power -- down from over 2.7 million at the height of the outages.

Public Service Electric & Gas says it could take until next week before it finishes restoring service to its remaining 716,000 customers still out on Friday morning.

Jersey Central Power & Light has more than 760,000 homes and businesses without electricity. Most are in Monmouth and Ocean counties.

Atlantic City Electric is working to reconnect 47,656 customers. Orange & Rockland is reporting 46,659 outages in the two northern New Jersey counties that it serves.

Christie also says the federal government will be providing rail cars to help NJ Transit get train service up and running. But he gave no timetable. He said 25 percent of the system's rail cars were in yards that flooded.