John Huvane drove through a tunnel to Manhattan on the second day after the collapse of the Twin Towers, seeing the island shrouded in endless white smoke. At the age of just 40, New York City detective Huvane stopped his car, asking himself, “Where are you going? You just came from here.” And then, Huvane did the work done by hundreds of thousands of first responders in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks.
He drove to work.
For about four months, Huvane worked in an extremely tense state every day, relying on the miraculous survival instincts of the human body, as he and countless other rescue workers worked like ants on a pile of unbelievable 1.6 million tons of crushed concrete. Besides being exposed to toxic concrete carcinogens, jet fuel, glass, and asbestos entered their lungs.
Huvane told The Epoch Times, “There was such a strong smell of death in all of this.”
Huvane has experienced three separate shooting incidents in his career and has witnessed terror attacks in London and Mumbai.
He said that compared to his experiences during and after September 11, everything else paled in comparison. Today, he climbs stairs with firefighters; to help support the families of first responders, he participated in a 5K run to aid victims of catastrophic injuries; an organization he co-hosts, Tunnel to Towers, will repay over 200 home mortgages for families who lost loved ones due to health hazards from the 9/11 recovery efforts. Huvane said that the terrorist attacks did not shake his optimism.
“No, I’ve seen good people, I’ve seen amazing sacrifices and courageous acts,” he said. “It’s very inspiring.”
Among the many heroes who moved Huvane was a firefighter who died in the Twin Towers disaster, Stephen Siller, who could have been golfing that day. On the second day after the attacks, as Huvane drove to work, Stephen Siller had just left work ahead of him. When he was getting ready to go golfing with his Brooklyn brothers, he heard the scanner in his truck crackle and learned that a plane had crashed. Driving back to the station, he grabbed his 60-pound gear and oxygen, heading towards the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
Unfortunately, Siller found it closed. He would have to proceed on foot through the tunnel under the East River.
Moments before the attack in Manhattan, Huvane was serving as the mayor’s bodyguard. He was at the Twin Towers when they were hit but arrived before they collapsed. “We were having breakfast in Midtown Manhattan and I got a call that a small plane had hit the tower,” he told The Epoch Times, “So I rushed down there.”
The scene he witnessed was chilling.
“The word ‘chaos’ doesn’t even begin to describe it,” he said. “People were running out of the buildings. Women dropped their bags, kicked off their shoes, and ran barefoot. I walked past an airplane engine.” Huvane will never forget the sight of people jumping from the buildings or the sound of bodies hitting the ground. He saw buildings and planes fall, hearing terrible sounds all around.
As the government tried its best to regain control and obtain military support, bridges, tunnels, and everything else that needed to be closed were closed. The nation was under attack, and no one knew if there would be more attacks.
Huvane said, “It was very dangerous because people and debris were falling down, and when they did, it was very dangerous if you were below.”
Huvane was speaking with a driver when suddenly the driver reversed and stepped on the gas. The driver saw something that Huvane couldn’t see as he was facing the opposite direction, until he turned around and saw: the first tower of the twin towers collapsing amidst billowing white smoke. The thick smoke rolled between the buildings on either side of the street towards him.
“It looked like that scene from the movie ‘Indiana Jones,’ with the big ball rolling towards you, and you start running,” Huvane said. “So I began running away from it, and it was chasing me. So I turned down a small street.”
He narrowly escaped, but could feel the power of the explosion.
When he saw a firetruck coming down the small street towards him and the Twin Towers, he tried to wave it off with a flag. “I didn’t know what fire truck that was or whether those firefighters died that day,” Huvane said.
After the second tower collapsed, Huvane jumped to protect the mayor by his side. When a small crisis headquarters was finally set up after dealing with the crisis, he finally went home that night, unlike dozens of his friends. Unlike Siller – who crawled through the stifling hot Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, dragging heavy gear for nearly 3 miles, and never came back to him, Huvane drove to work the next day and began the horrific recovery work.
“Of the people I know, maybe 50 people died that day, and another 20 to 25 people died afterwards,” he said. He did not know Siller, but later learned of Siller’s sacrifice and his brother Frank Siller, who founded the Tunnel to Towers organization in his honor. “He had just left work,” Huvane told The Epoch Times, “He could have been golfing that day. But these first responders, these firefighters, they came rushing in, even though they were all off duty.”
This year, 63-year-old Huvane and Frick Siller pay tribute to first responders who died from long-term health effects during recovery work. The Tunnel to Towers organization will pay off their home mortgages and provide mental health services for hundreds of surviving families. Rodrick Covington, a New York State Police Lieutenant Colonel who died of invasive cancer in March 2022, is one of them. “I knew him in the work,” Huvane said, talking about the time they served the city together.
“The real heroes are those who are not remembered. Of course, I say this not to diminish the heroic acts, but to praise those who, after losing loved ones, can get up every morning and keep moving forward,” he said. “That, in itself, is a heroic act.”