Excerpts of Christopher Lyons oral history interview conducted by Julie Broihier, August 4, 2010

About

Christopher Lyons was at home on 9/11, when his cell phone and pager started to go off. Christopher had previous training in search and rescue, so he called the Bellmore Fire Department and went to help as a volunteer. He remembers driving down the Long Island Expressway and seeing the plume of smoke from the towers. When the second tower fell, he remembers driving up a darkened Westside Highway. The taillights of the firetruck in front of him appeared out of the dark, right before the truck he was in ran into the back of it. He recalls that everything was covered in thick dust, and it got difficult to breathe, but no one was thinking about masks. The first response was to deal with the people in distress who were coming out of the debris. He said the most powerful thing was when someone yelled "Quiet," to signify the discovery of a body or a trapped person. When he needed a break, he drove up the Westside Highway and saw a line of people who pulled him out of his car and hugged him. He calls them the "Thank You People," and says "without them, I probably would never have made it." There were many times when he did not go home, and instead stayed onsite. He says "Like everybody else, I ended up a single person out of 9/11," as his girlfriend did not want to talk about his experiences with him. He tries to focus on the positives that came out of 9/11: the Thank You people, the businesses that banded together, and the solidarity of people in NYC.

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed