By Grace Da Rocha
Las Vegas Sun
NEW YORK —Terrance “Terry” Revella remembers many things about Sept. 11, 2001: the temperature that Tuesday morning, the two doughnuts from Dunkin’ his wife gave him before work, the bodies of people jumping to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center towers and the words of his fellow officer, Jeff Cox , after the two were caught in a collapsing tower.
“Goodbye, captain.”
Cox had been on the job only six months.
Today marks 25 years since the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, when 19 terrorists associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaida seized U.S. passenger jets and crashed them into the Pentagon and the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. A fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pa., after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.
Revella, a retired captain with the New York State Environmental Conservation Police now living in Las Vegas, was one of the first responders on the scene during the attacks and survived the collapse of both World Trade Center towers. He has since given speeches about his experience at Ground Zero and released a book about it just before the anniversary — all to ensure nobody forgets what happened that day, he said.
“I don’t want people to ever forget,” Revella, 73, said. “It’s important to remember the 3,000 people that died that day and the 9,000 that have died since then. It’s important that their legacy should never be forgotten. Like we remember Pearl Harbor , which will never happen again — and that’s 80 years ago compared to 9/11, which is 25 years ago, (but), to me, is like yesterday — it happened, and we should never forget.”
The attacks killed almost 3,000 people and led President George W. Bush to declare a “war on terror,” launching the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — a period of violence that led to an estimated death toll of more than 940,000 people between 2001 and 2023 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, according to the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Communities across the nation will come together to remember those affected by the violence during the anniversary, but for Revella, it feels like yesterday.
When Revella received the 9 a.m. call that a plane had struck the north tower, he rushed to the scene with several fellow officers, including Cox, who also survived. He arrived just after the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
One of Revella’s most striking memories from that day is from the plaza beneath the towers before they began to fall, where he helped firefighters push hoses. He still remembers seeing the Social Security numbers scrawled in chalk on each firefighter’s gear — faces he never saw again.
Both towers collapsed within an hour of each other that morning, sending a cloud of debris and devastation through Lower Manhattan that damaged or destroyed more than a dozen nearby buildings. Earlier that day, Revella had survived the north tower’s collapse when a firefighter ran from a nearby truck, grabbed him around the waist, and pulled him over a Jersey barrier as the force of the impact threw them both, he said.
Revella and Cox later took shelter from the collapses in 7 World Trade Center with a group of other first responders but became trapped when fires sparked by debris brought that building down as well. As debris rained down on them, Revella said he felt his soul leave his body for 30 seconds and struggled to breathe or see as dust and toxins caked his face.
Revella was diagnosed with asthma, emphysema — a long-term lung condition that causes shortness of breath — and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, from his time working during and after 9/11. He also developed musculoskeletal problems on the left side of his body from being thrown over the barrier with a firefighter, and he has fought skin cancer five times — all attributed to his exposure to toxins during the recovery effort.
Many first responders, cleanup workers and civilians near the World Trade Center that day have developed medical ailments from exposure to debris and toxic chemicals, but access to treatment has been a long and difficult road for some. Thousands of first responders, cleanup crew members and civilians have died in the years since from medical issues related to debris and the inhalation of toxic fumes near the site.
On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched the city’s first public portal for 9/11 records after years of demands for transparency from survivors, advocates and first responders.
The portal includes about 170,000 pages on health concerns, air quality and the city’s response to the attacks, according to city officials, who said Mamdani’s administration reviewed the 2001 documents and found that government leaders at the time understood the dangers posed by burning toxins at Ground Zero and worried about potential lawsuits related to chemical exposure, even as the city told the public that conditions were safe.
Revella said he struggled after surviving.
He developed alcoholism, worked with a psychiatrist to help him through the trauma of that time and lived for a while with survivor’s guilt, a term for the conflict experienced by those who live through deadly events.
Now 20 years sober, Revella has told his story to anyone who would listen, from first responder agencies to community groups. He once kept a stack of photos in a drawer at home that he would take out and sort through around the anniversary of 9/11, processing all that he saw and experienced that day.
But this year, that healing process was channeled into last month’s release of his new book, “The Day the World Changed: A Visual and Narrative Account of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.”
Revella didn’t want to forget that day, or the way people came together in its aftermath. He remembers residents of New York helping first responders wash the dust from their faces, the Muslim owner of a nearby cafe who let him call his wife that night to tell her he was alive and the first responders from across the nation and the globe who traveled to help with recovery efforts.
It took Revella and writer J.R. Sackett two months to complete the book, which contains Revella’s firsthand account of what he experienced that day and in the months that followed, along with photographs taken by a fellow officer. The book was released last month and is available for purchase on Amazon.
Revella said writing the book became a form of therapy as he sat with Sackett flipping through hundreds of photos and revisiting moments that still linger in the back of his mind more than two decades later. He hopes the book will become one of many pieces chronicling this part of history for future generations.
“I say ‘The Day the World Changed’ because it did change — ( Transportation Security Administration ); Homeland Security; the way we do business ... so the world did change how we think, how we look at things differently,” Revella said. “But I have this thing I follow that a Korean War veteran said: ‘All gave some, and some gave all,’ and that’s a true statement, because some did give all and they’re not here anymore, but we’re here for them.”
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