A retired New York City Fire Dept. lieutenant who was nearly buried alive in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers recounted his extraordinary survival story at Southold’s American Legion post on Sunday.
Joseph Torrillo, a former lieutenant with the FDNY, appeared as part of Be The One, a national American Legion campaign aimed at preventing veteran suicide.
Torillo was scheduled to speak at a press conference in midtown Manhattan the morning of the attacks, but after the planes hit the towers, he drove in from Brooklyn and headed straight for his first firehouse, Engine and Ladder 10 on Liberty St., right across the street from the South Tower.
The veteran firefighter had seen his share of death on the job — stabbings, shootings, car wrecks, suicides. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, just before the South Tower began to fall, he looked up and saw something he can’t forget: people, hundreds of feet in the air, clinging to the edges of windows as black smoke and flames spilled out.
“People were hanging out of the burning towers, waving articles of clothing and gesturing — desperate for help,” he said.
He couldn’t reach them. He felt utterly helpless. One by one, and then in pairs, they began to fall.
“They started coming down like raindrops,” he told the crowd. “I’m watching them come down, hugging each other. People were holding hands, one after another. The hardest part was not getting hit by these jumpers.
“They were coming down and I’m counting down the seconds, knowing that in eight to 10 seconds they will hit the street and just splatter, and disappear. I’m watching people in the last seconds of their lives, and it was just too much to comprehend.”
Before he became a firefighter, Torrillo studied architecture and building sciences. When he saw plumes of flaming jet fuel spilling out of the upper floors, he knew what was coming. He warned everyone he could.
“Nobody would listen to me,” he said. “Nobody believed me. I didn’t think they were going to collapse as soon as they did. I thought we have five to six hours, but I was really worried about the ambulance crews who had set up triage in the lobby of the South Tower.
“This fire was beyond our control,” he said. “It was beyond our reach. This was an EMT and paramedics operation. I wanted them to get out, but they gave me a really hard time, saying ‘who the hell are you?’ and ‘you have no authority.’ I almost got in a fistfight with these guys. It got really vicious and angry.”
Just before 10 a.m., Torrillo got out of the tower and onto the street. That’s when the rumble began.
“I heard this loud rumble in the walls and I looked up, and here comes the South Tower, coming down faster and faster and all this debris is hitting people around me.”
He started running, soaked in sweat, wearing a uniform he had borrowed from a firefighter at Engine & Ladder 10. He sprinted toward a pedestrian footbridge over West Street.
“At this point, all I want in my life is to make it underneath the footbridge so that my body can be identified. I figured I had about 10 seconds to live and I was just worried that my body was never going to be found or identified.”
A shard of steel struck the back of his head. Concrete slabs rained down, snapping his arm, fracturing his skull, breaking ribs. Internal bleeding began.
“My left arm was snapped in half and I’m bleeding internally,” he said. “The blood was just pumping out of my body.”
In agony, he realized he had been buried alive.
“There was no more air left. No more light. It was dark as midnight and I’m buried with all these people in the darkness, suffocating to death, and all around me there are people screaming at the top of their lungs.
“After a while, the screams turn into cries and then into whimpers, and the whimpers turn into silence and, one by one, they’re all dead, and I’m surrounded by fires.”
In the darkness, he began to pray.
“I didn’t want to die angry. I accepted what was happening to me. I just didn’t want to die angry.”
He thought of the night before, coming home late to find his children still awake. He had promised them that tomorrow night, they’d sit down with a calendar and finally pick a date for their long-awaited trip to Disney World.
Now, beneath the ruins of a city, he was imagining another man taking his place.
“There’s going to be a new daddy that’s going to come into their lives,” he thought. “My wife is going to get over my death and she’s going to find a new guy, and it’ll be the new Daddy that’s going to get that opportunity to take them to Disney World.”
Then, silence. Torrillo lost consciousness.
He came to in a pocket of air, entombed with three other firefighters. Rescuers eventually found them, strapped him to a stretcher and began to race him to the Hudson River, when a boat would take him to a hospital in New Jersey.
“I heard them say I was going to die if they didn’t get me to a hospital.”
They made it to the river and boarded the boat, laying his stretcher on the deck. But just as the boat began to pull away, the rumble came again.
“The other tower’s coming down!”
Glass came raining from the sky like shrapnel. Black smoke enveloped everything and debris poured down. Everyone jumped overboard. Torrillo, still strapped down, was left alone on the deck.
He rocked the stretcher back and forth until it tipped and fell ten feet below. He somehow crawled into the doorway of the engine room, but debris from the North Tower began to bury the boat. He was suffocating again.
He blacked out a second time.
Doctors in New Jersey worked to save him. Back in Lower Manhattan, his brothers at Engine 10 and Ladder 10 assumed he had died. He was wearing another firefighter’s gear. No one had seen him since the collapse.
“At about one o’clock in the morning [on Sept. 12], the firefighters called my house and got my wife on the phone,” Torrillo said. “They broke down and said ‘we don’t think Joe made it. We found his car, but he hasn’t come back.’”
But Torrillo had survived.
He would reunite with his family and his firehouse. And over the years, he would come to believe that he had been spared for a reason.
Looking back on the 343 firefighters who lost their lives that day, Torrillo said that “for some reason, they left me behind to tell their story.”
After retiring from the department, Torrillo became a tour guide at Ground Zero and later began sharing his experiences with audiences all over the world.
“I want to bring people together and resurrect patriotism and love of our country.”
The Be the One campaign is a concentrated effort by American Legion posts nationwide to prevent suicides among veterans and service members.
Veterans face a 57% higher risk of suicide than non-veterans in the U.S., and between 17 and 22 veterans take their own lives every day, according to the American Legion. In recent years, these efforts have helped to drive down veteran suicide rates.
Anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide is encouraged to dial 988 to access The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.