There are many stories due to September 11, 2001, but Bianca Figueroa-Greco and Rafe Greco said they haven’t heard one quite like theirs, even 25 years later.
Bianca worked for Turner Construction, and on the morning of 9/11, she was in the North Tower below ground. She had been hired to fix up the mechanical rooms.
At 8:46 a.m., she said the elevator slammed into the basement.
“There was a rushing explosion sound that kind of entered our office,” she said.
One of the maintenance workers, through the quickly thickening smoke, emerged to show Bianca and her colleagues the way out, because the doors nearby were all locked.
By the time she emerged, without a clue what had happened 17 minutes earlier, she looked up to watch United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower.
“I could hear the debris coming like rain approaching, and it started to hit, flaming debris in front of me as I’m running,” she recalled. “So I got under a car.”
She said she hid there until she no longer heard the debris singeing the ground around her. When she crawled out, she saw she wasn’t the only person who had been under that car. He was on fire.
“I remember just kind of saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re on fire.'” And I helped put out the fire. We looked at each other for a moment, and there was just horror in both of our faces,” she said.
And then they both ran away. She has no idea who it was she helped.
As she headed to the Bronx, Rafe Greco headed to the wreckage.
“I’ve never been to war, you know, I’ve never seen war up close. But if I was to imagine it, it was something like that,” he said about looking at what remained of the World Trade Center.
Rafe is a welder, and he went there to help cut the wreckage in the rescue and recovery effort.
“It was very disorienting. Everything was gray. All of the street signs were covered up. You couldn’t tell where you were. And I knew the area,” he said, having grown up in lower Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Bianca said she couldn’t escape what she had run from. It was all that played on television.
She called Turner Construction and requested to work. She was stationed at World Trade Center 7, which also fell on 9/11, where workers, like Rafe, were removing debris.
“She would check the signatures and names of people who would come in and out,” Rafe said.
When he went to check in with her one day, he added another note.
“I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Would you have lunch?'” Rafe said.
Bianca agreed.
“Most people are surprised they never heard about a love story coming out from such a terrible situation and working,” she said.
Both of them told NY1 it was difficult to talk with others about their work in lower Manhattan. They leaned on one another.
Eleven years later, they got married.
Bianca, who already had a young daughter when she met Rafe, now has a 12-year-old son, too.
“We consider him our Ground Zero baby,” she said.
Their connection to the site goes beyond their family.
Rafe cut down many beams from the World Trade Center. And at the site that would become the 9/11 Memorial, visited by thousands every day, Rafe created small memorials for many people grieving.
“There was a lot of firemen who said, ‘Hey, listen, I lost my brother. Could you cut a cross for me?'” Rafe remembered. “It was kind of frowned upon by administration, but it was done anyway.”
And that led to hundreds of crosses being constructed out of the beams from the towers where more than 2,700 were killed on 9/11.
One, he remembered, was sent to a family in Wisconsin.
Andrea Haberman was visiting New York for meetings at the World Trade Center for her brokerage firm, Carr Futures. She got to the North Tower for her 9 a.m. meeting 20 minutes early, on the 92nd floor.
She was 25 years old.
A cross built by Rafe now sits in Andrea Haberman’s parents’ yard.
“It was an honor to be able to do something like that,” Rafe said.
Even more so, he added, because the Habermans reached out to him.
“We’ve since been like family. We speak at least once a year, usually more than that,” Rafe said. “What a beautiful family. And, you know, what an incredible person Andrea Haberman was.”
After spending more than eight months at the site, he was asked to do something to mark the end of the cleanup. Rafe Greco was one of four people who cut down the final beam.
He said for a while, it was impossible to move the final piece of the towers.
“The debris in the hole started to come down, a beam started to appear out of the dirt, and it became a pattern,” he said. “They tried to move it, that the beam was still connected down below.”
That beam has become a central point at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, visible for all visitors to see.
“The statistics at that point as to how many civilians were lost, how many firefighters were lost, how many NYPD members were lost as it went down, all became written on to the beam,” he said.
He said he had his torch engraved with the same statistics.
He knew early on he wanted to be a part of cutting down the final beam, and he said it was an honor when he was picked.
“It kind of marked the ability to rebuild after that. It was the finalization of that time of demolition and chaos,” he said, describing what he called an emotional moment.
Bianca was there, watching Rafe that day on May 30, 2002.
“It was an emotional experience,” she said.
They both said they talk regularly about their time at the World Trade Center site. They confide in each other on those hard days.
Bianca said she still struggles with loud noises. Rafe said he had a recurring nightmare about the World Trade Center that lasted a long time.
Every September 11, Bianca said she watches the names read of those who died at the World Trade Center. She lost several friends that day.
“Those words never forget are real for us,” she said.
But for all the tragedy and all the trauma, she and Rafe found each other. And for that, Rafe and Bianca said they are grateful.