But Mr. Vaz also sees a silver lining in the destruction wrought by Sandy: a blank slate that allows the town made famous by the drunken shenanigans of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” to shed its boozy reputation.

“It’s in our history book, past tense; we’ll never do that again,” he says of the “Jersey Shore” days. He pointed to new restaurants, a bakery on the boardwalk, nights where families can camp on the beach, and the many “new structures” like the Hydrus as a sign of the new Seaside Heights.

It took nearly five years to rebuild the wooden pier for the coaster to rest on. The Jet Star was built on a part of the pier that jutted out far into the ocean. As they thought about rebuilding, venturing back out into the sea with the memory of Sandy still fresh seemed less than ideal, so the Storino family offered the town a land swap. In exchange for the right to build along the beach, the amusement park donated land to expand public parking.

Gov. Chris Christie visited the coaster on Friday for a ride and a ribbon-cutting, part of the final “boardwalk walk” of his tenure. For the governor who was defined as much by the storm as he was by the so-called Bridgegate scandal, Mr. Christie took pride in the resilience of his home state.

“In the same way that the Jet Star was the iconic symbol of what happened here during Superstorm Sandy, the Hydrus is now going to be forever the iconic symbol of the comeback of the Jersey Shore from Hurricane Sandy,” he told the crowd.