Updated 25th Anniversary Local Hero Tribute: Chris Blackwell On this anniversary of September 11, I wanted to take a moment to remember a Greater Danbury hero who made the ultimate sacrifice that morning. Christopher J. Blackwell of FDNY Rescue 3 was a New Fairfield kid who never really left home, even after he became one of the most decorated firefighters in New York. He grew up here, graduated Immaculate High School in 1977, and joined New Fairfield Volunteer Fire Company A at 16. He stayed a member for 25 years. After a stretch in the Air Force as a firefighter-paramedic, he spent 20 years with the FDNY, the last 12 with Rescue 3 — “Big Blue” — the Bronx heavy-rescue company that handled building collapses across the city. He taught void search and collapse rescue to departments all over the country. He earned the Heroism and Community Service Medal in 1989, the Thomas Kennedy Medal in 1990, and the Medal of Valor in 1992. When he was off duty from the FDNY, Chris still worked as a paramedic across Greater Danbury. Danbury Ambulance. Ridgefield. Bethel. Brookfield. Redding. Newtown. New Fairfield. He brought the “big-city rescue knowledge” back to the same towns he called home. That part is personal for my family. Chris worked with my dad and my uncles at the Ridgefield Fire Department in the 1980s and 1990s. They still talk about him the same way. “He was one of the best medics I ever worked with.” “Now he was a real, old-school, paramedic and firefighter.” A week before September 11, he was back in Ridgefield trying to set up collapse and trench-rescue training. Ridgefield later said they considered him one on of their own. He was 42. He left behind his wife, Jane, and three children — Alexandra, Ryan, and Samantha. All three went into public service. Ryan followed his father into the FDNY. When I first posted about Chris in 2023, a comment stopped me cold. Jason Aurrichio wrote that he never met the man, and that Chris was still responsible for the life he has now: “Chris responded to a motor vehicle accident in the early hours of May 27, 1996. It involved Jason’s future wife — someone Jason had not even met yet. When Chris arrived, her pulse was gone or nearly gone. He got it back. She lived. Jason wrote that she would not be here without that selfless decision to answer the call. The same kind of call would take Chris’s life a little over five years later.” That is the measure of the man. He saved people who never knew his name. Then, on a clear Tuesday morning in 2001, he went up the stairs of the North Tower with Rescue 3 to try to save people he would never meet. RIP to Chris Blackwell and to every victim of that day — the ones we lost in the towers and the ones the years still take.

WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED IN DANBURY THIS AFTERNOON? DANBURY, Conn. — A severe thunderstorm that crossed Danbury just before 3 p.m. Thursday knocked down trees and power lines in several neighborhoods, even though radar never showed a classic “big wind” signature. National Weather Service reports and local accounts place the worst of it in a tight area around 2:47–2:53PM: • A large tree fell on Interstate 84 eastbound near North Street • Trees and wires came down on roads leading to Northwell Danbury Hospital • A tree blocked Hospital Avenue • Wires were down on Virginia Avenue • Trees and wires were reported on Glen Hill Road near Tamarack Avenue • Quarter-size hail was observed on Granville Avenue The storm was moving northeast at about 30–35 mph and had already been under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for damaging wind and hail. The storm strengthened over Northern Ridgefield (Ridgebury) but the wind waited to let loose near Downtown Danbury. This was not a long, sweeping wind event and it was not a tornado. It was a wet microburst — a sudden burst of rain-cooled air that slams to the ground under a heavy downpour. Think of it like this: a thunderstorm builds a thick column of rain. That rain is heavy. When the core of the storm collapses, all that water and the cold air around it rush downward. When that air hits the ground it has to go somewhere, so it spreads out in all directions. That’s the damaging wind. It can be strong in a small area and gone in a few minute… which is EXACTLY what we saw. The main radar that covers Danbury (KOKX on Long Island) looks at the storm from about 50–60 miles away. At that distance, even the lowest scan is looking several thousand feet above the ground. A wet microburst’s strongest winds can be only in the lowest 1,000–2,000 feet — right where people and trees are, and right where that radar beam is too high to see them clearly. What the radar did see was a core of very heavy rain. That heavy-rain signature is often the best clue that a collapsing core and a burst of wind are possible, even when the velocity product looks unimpressive. This makes is harder for a meteorologist like me to track, because we can’t see the wind, only the water. In many other damaging wind events, I can see the wind core on velocity scans - like July 4th earlier in the summer. Residents in the affected Danbury neighborhoods should still watch for lingering downed wires and blocked side streets. If you see a line on the ground, treat it as live. Just by the damage, I think hurricane force gusts occurred! — Meteorologist Jack Drake