It's been a little more than a day since the Child Victims Act lookback period began and state court officials said there have already been at least 427 cases filed against alleged abusers statewide.

In a radio interview on WBEN Thursday morning, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul said she's shocked a quarter of those new filings came out of Western New York.

"I think there's going to be thousands of cases, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball, but just looking at what happened in the first 24 hours here,” she said. “We knew there were a lot of people, but I did not have a sense of the scale or the scope of it. But, what that says to me is there's been a lot of people suffering in silence for decades who've had to live with the pain and the nightmare of what happened to them when they were innocent children, and now they have their just day in court."

The lookback window allows victims to sue their alleged abusers in civil court for the next year, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred.