NEW YORK CITY (WGHP) — Almost everyone has a story about 9/11. Maybe they were there and survived. Maybe they had a loved one there who didn’t. Maybe it’s about where they were when they saw it all on TV.
Nobody has a story quite like Joe Torrillo.
“My story goes back nine months before Sept. 11 to January of 2001,” says Torrillo. “That’s where the story really begins.”
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Torrillo had already put in his 20 years on the New York City Fire Department on that day, but he still had a lot more he wanted to do with the department. He was recovering from an injury and working a desk job when he got a call from the Fisher-Price Corporation in January of 2001. They wanted to create an action figure based on NYFD personnel called “Billy Blazes.” Joe worked beginning that January to make that happen, and Fisher-Price wanted to unveil it in time for the Holiday season. Joe looked for a date and figured Sept. 11 made sense, since it was, like the emergency phone number, “9-1-1.”
He left his office in Brooklyn and was heading over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan to attend the press conference unveiling the toy when he saw the towers smoking.
“And as I’m getting over to the Manhattan side I can see about 10 to 12 floors of fire all around the top of the North Tower,” Joe said. “Now I’m saying to myself, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. This couldn’t have been a Cessna 172. It must have been a jet, but it doesn’t make sense because jets don’t fly in that direction that low.'”
Joe had a decision to make:
“Do I make a right and go to Rockefeller Center for the press conference? Or do I make a left and make my way to my old firehouse where I started my career?” he said. The answer was obvious.
Joe got to his old firehouse at a key moment.
“And as I’m running past the South Tower, I hear a roar, and I look up, and the second jet comes right over my head. I’m the only one underneath it now, of course, I realize that we’re under a terrorist attack. I mean, this is no coincidence, two jets striking two towers within 17 minutes,” said Joe.
Not long after, those on the upper floors of the tower could no longer stand the destruction nor wait to be saved.
“All of a sudden, they started jumping one after another all around me,” says Joe. “One after another, you know, some hugging, some holding each other, tumbling saucers hitting the streets, hitting the tops of roofs of other buildings.”
Then, just before 10 a.m., things took a bad turn for Joe and so many people in and around the South Tower.
“I thought maybe a bomb had gone off, I don’t know, but all I know is this big mushroom cloud with debris is coming down right at me. And I start running as fast as I can,” said Joe. “My helmet was flying faster than I was running and I’m running as fast as I can and I’m looking at my helmet like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.”
He couldn’t outrun the falling tower, which hit the hotel between the two towers and buried so many people beneath it, including Joe.
“Now I’m buried under the hotel with all these other people in the darkness,” said Joe. He has no idea why he was able to breathe long enough to be saved, but he says he had thoughts he never realized he would as he lay beneath the rubble, including conversations he had recently with his three children recently.
“They said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, you said when you come home tonight, we’re going to make a plan to go to Disney World,'” Joe recalled. “‘You’ve been telling us for the last two years. All you do is you always work. You never come home. You promised tonight that we’re going to make a plan to go to Disney World.’ I said, ‘Kids, look, tomorrow I got a big day. Very important day tomorrow. When I come home tomorrow after my press conference, we’ll make plans to go to Disney World.’ And I kept on saying to myself, ‘It’s better than taking my last breaths of life. Why did I never take these kids to Disney World?'”
Rescue workers were able to extract him from the rubble and get him on a boat on the Hudson River that had come to help triage the patients.
“And they had me on the deck of the boat. They were holding my head. I’m screaming in pain. I’m losing a lot of blood. And I heard them saying that I’m going to die if I couldn’t get to a hospital. And I realized I must be in worse shape than I even know or think. Then at that point, people start screaming, ‘Oh my God, here comes the other tower.'”
At 10:28, the North Tower collapsed and Joe was buried alive for the second time in half an hour. Rescuers miraculously extracted him from the rubble a second time and Joe survived it all.
“People call me Felix the Cat,” said Joe. “They’re like, ‘When are you going to run out of lives?’ But I had so many near-death experiences you can never understand and there’s something inside of me that says, ‘Somebody needs me. Somebody wants me here.'”
Was that reason to maybe finally take those three kids to Disney World?
“I ended up buying my kids a timeshare. And now they don’t want to go anymore because now they’re all grown up,” said Joe. “All three of my daughters are registered nurses. My son for seven years was a paramedic and, as of last year, became a New York City firefighter.”
Hear more of Joe Torrillo’s story in this edition of The Buckley Report.
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