(NewsNation) — A retired New York City fire official who was rescued twice from Ground Zero is remembering 9/11 as the 25th anniversary nears.
Joseph Torrillo, then an FDNY lieutenant, was on his way to a news conference on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Torrillo stopped at a nearby fire station to exchange his dress uniform for borrowed fire gear.
“The second jet came right over my head, and I realized we’re under a terrorist attack,” he told “NewsNation Prime” on Saturday.
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Torrillo said he realized the towers would eventually collapse, but he was on the scene nearly an hour later when the South Tower fell.
“I started running, but I didn’t make it,” he recalled. “A piece of steel split the back of my head open, and slabs of concrete (were) just hitting my body. With every slab of concrete, more and more bones are breaking.”
Fire Lieutenant Joseph Torrillo, who was injured in the World Trade Center collapse, attends the funeral of the Fire Department’s First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan at St. Mel’s Church in Flushing, Queens. (Photo by Bill Turnbull/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Under the rubble, it was suffocating and dark. But Torrillo remembers hearing other people who were trapped.
“Then after a while, there was nothing but silence, and I was in the middle of all these fires. I was hoping I’d suffocate before I burnt to death,” he said.
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Within half an hour, he said, rescuers were able to extricate Torrillo and three others. From there, he was taken on a stretcher to the deck of a boat along the Hudson River. When the North Tower collapsed, he said, everyone else jumped overboard as debris rained down onto the vessel.
Torrillo was able to dive into the engine room, where he was later found.
“I ended up waking up in an operating room, in Jersey City Trauma Center, and for three days the fire department didn’t know where I was, had me declared dead,” Torrillo said.
Twenty-five years later, the former firefighter said, he thinks of 9/11 as a dual tragedy, given that two towers 131 feet apart from each other collapsed.
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“We had two 110-story buildings … fully engulfed in fire and flames and smoke and noxious gas, with thousands of people trapped. And so, it was not an incident. We were dealing with two incidents at the same time.”
Fewer than two dozen survivors were pulled from wreckage at Ground Zero, where more than 2,700 people, including emergency responders, perished. Around 15,000 were able to escape the complex before the buildings fell.
Terrorists who attacked New York also crashed an airliner into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
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