Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in Louisiana, leaving behind a humanitarian catastrophe that claimed more than 1,800 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands. Amid the chaos and suffering, stories of courage and resilience emerged—few more remarkable than that of Chris Lyons, a Long Islander whose split-second decision-making and unyielding drive to save lives turned him into an unlikely leader in one of America’s darkest hours.
Lyons, now 56 and living in Middle Island, wasn’t a firefighter or police officer by trade, but by 2005, he had already earned a reputation as a “large-scale disaster specialist.” His background included deployments at the Pine Barrens wildfire in 1995, the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and even the recovery of the Space Shuttle Columbia. When Katrina struck New Orleans, Lyons got a call from colleagues in emergency management who recognized his talent for organizing chaos.
What he didn’t know until he arrived in Louisiana was that he would be placed in charge.
“I thought I was there to pitch in wherever I was needed,” Lyons recalled. “But General Myles Deering from the Army National Guard looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘You’re in charge.’ That was the moment it hit me—we had to lead teams of soldiers and rescuers through a disaster zone where every decision could mean life or death.”
Lyons and his partner, Dave Fowler, a Michigan lawman and boatsman, quickly assembled search-and-rescue crews. Armed with little more than maps, radios, and their instincts, they navigated submerged streets where homes were half underwater and the stench of decay hung in the air.
It was during one of these missions that Lyons’ team made a discovery that would become national news.
“We noticed that some houses were marked with ‘X’s—the sign they’d been searched—but the waterline told us nobody could have gotten inside,” Lyons said. “I told the team, we need to go back. Somebody could still be alive in there.”
Hours later, his hunch proved tragically correct. The crew heard faint cries and found a woman named Martina trapped inside her home. She had survived 10 days by drinking the foul floodwater. “She was buck naked, weak, and on the edge of death,” Lyons remembered. “We wrapped her in a red muumuu we found in a neighboring apartment and cut her balcony open to get her down to the boats.”
Martina was airlifted to safety in a dramatic rescue captured by NBC’s Dateline, whose chief reporter, Steve Handelsman, had quietly embedded with Lyons’ crew. “That story paid for my grandchildren’s college,” Handelsman later told him, acknowledging the magnitude of the scoop.
For Lyons, the impact was more personal. Weeks later, by sheer coincidence, he ran into one of Martina’s caretakers in Tennessee—and through an improbable chain of events was reconnected with the very woman he had rescued. “When I heard her voice on the phone, I knew instantly,” Lyons said. “You don’t forget a voice like that. We all broke down in tears when we saw her again.”
The experience cemented in Lyons a new mission: not just rescuing victims in the moment, but helping first responders themselves recover. “What we saw when we went back was heartbreaking,” he explained. “New Orleans police had lost their homes, their cars had bullet holes and doughnuts for tires, and their uniforms were dirty. Some were living under the I-10 bridge with their families.”
Recognizing that the rescuers needed rescuing, Lyons and Fowler formed Cops Helping Cops, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting law enforcement officers and their families after disasters. The group began by delivering basic supplies—soap, sanitizer, food—and went on to rebuild 22 homes for police families devastated by Katrina.
Since then, Cops Helping Cops has grown into a nationwide network. The group has worked with Walmart, Penske, and Home Depot to mobilize relief, including providing N95 masks and supplies to correction officers during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve also partnered with federal agencies and appeared in national media, with John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted producing a public service announcement on their behalf.
“People see the uniform and assume first responders are taken care of,” Lyons said. “But in Katrina, cops were sleeping on cots in mold-ridden homes. In COVID, they were handed see-through masks. Our job is to make sure the people who protect us don’t get forgotten.”
Two decades later, the memories of Katrina remain vivid for Lyons—the sights, the smells, and most of all, the faces of those who were saved. “That rescue of Martina wasn’t luck,” he reflected. “It was about refusing to accept that someone might be gone just because a mark on a building said so. You trust your instincts, you go back, and sometimes you find life where nobody else bothered to look.”
As the nation pauses to remember Hurricane Katrina 20 years later, the legacy of Chris Lyons endures—not just in the lives he helped pull from the water, but in the organization that rose from the floodwaters, making sure those who serve are never left behind.