When the second plane hit the World Trade Center 25 years ago, Karl Rolappe was standing in a yard beneath the Triborough Bridge, connecting steel girders on a routine morning’s work.

Within hours, he and roughly 21 other ironworkers were headed south on a nearly deserted FDR Drive, a crane in tow, toward the smoke still rising over lower Manhattan.

“We’re in a crane heading south, and there’s nobody on the highway on the south side except us,” Rolappe, a 1982 Palmerton High School graduate, said. “I was like, oh boy.”

Rolappe, a retired ironworker and Marine veteran now living in Towamensing Township, was among the first civilians to reach Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001. For two consecutive days, without sleep, he and his crew pulled steel from the smoldering pile, searching for survivors who never came.

Growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island before his family moved to Palmerton when he was 9 years old, Rolappe remembered taking the ferry with his grandmother to Manhattan and always looking at the towers.

In September 2001, he was working for American Bridge Company out of Pittsburgh, assigned to the Triborough Bridge as a member of Ironworkers Local 361, based in Brooklyn. He and a fellow Marine veteran, John Basillion of upstate New York, were in the yard below the bridge when they watched the second tower get struck. Neither man hesitated.

‘We knew we were going’

“Johnny said, ‘We’re under attack,’ ” Rolappe recalled. “We started to figure out who was going to come down with us, because we knew we were going. I called my sister and told her we were going into a very dangerous situation and to let everyone know I loved them. I wasn’t sure if we would all make it home.”

Rolappe’s Marine background had already shaped how he read the moment. He had lost friends in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The crew of about 22, including the crane operator, arrived on scene roughly an hour and a half to two hours after the second tower fell — well before 7 World Trade Center collapsed later that afternoon. They had an advantage most didn’t: carbon filter respirators used for lead abatement work on the bridge.

Along the way, Rolappe spotted a female police officer standing in the middle of the street, directing traffic amid the chaos. She was covered so completely in ash that only her eyes and nose were visible. She had no mask.

“We jumped off the crane and we ran over to her and we gave her one of those carbon filter masks,” he said. “She said, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ She’s one of my heroes of that day.”

The pile itself was unlike anything Rolappe had encountered in years of walking high steel. There were no sure footholds, no clear sight lines — only twisted, angled beams and voids that dropped into darkness below.

“You would look down in there sometimes and it’s like — do you ever see on a scary movie where there’s a well and there’s no end to it?” he said. “You do not want to slip into there.”

The crew worked the pile while 7 World Trade Center continued to burn in the background. Then it came down.

“My buddy Tommy and I just looked at each other and stood still,” Rolappe said.

The force from the collapse knocked them off their feet. When the wind and ash settled, both men stood up and turned back to work without a word.

“We just nodded and went back to it,” he said. “Your mind was in a numbing state or like a zone or something. Everything was surreal. You still weren’t in belief that this actually happened.”

Images that won’t fade

The memories of those two days have never fully left him. The smell of burning chemicals and ash was inescapable — a chemical, acrid odor he compared to the lead dust and burning steel of an ironworking job. He and his crew periodically removed their respirators when they became unbearable, just to catch a breath.

One image above all others has stayed with him.

“There was a hand laying on the ground with a ring. It was a man’s hand,” Rolappe said. “It hadn’t been burned or turned into ash or anything. Once in a while, I have a dream and I see that again.”

When the crew stopped to get water and food at makeshift relief stations set up by volunteers, they found firefighters gathered in small groups.

“A lot of them would be crying because their close buddies were killed,” he said. “We were trying to say kind words to them and trying to console them — just kind of be comrades with those guys.”

Into the dust and smoke

By the end of the second day, the scene had shifted. The sky was beginning to show through the smoke.

“It was like a more hopeful feeling,” Rolappe said. “We knew that a lot of people died, and we were just very remorseful. But we were feeling there was some hope there — a new start.”

His crew did not find anyone alive.

The experience left lasting marks. Rolappe enrolled in the World Trade Center medical monitoring program and said he has experienced unexplained shortness of breath, a heaviness in his chest that arrives without warning, often when exposed to air quality he would have once ignored.

“My chest is getting heavy, and I can’t breathe right sometimes,” he said. “They couldn’t really pin anything on that. So I just go through life. It’s one of the mysteries for me.”

He also served at Camp Lejeune for 28 months and said he cannot always separate those health issues from the ones that followed Ground Zero.

Opening up after years of silence

For more than 20 years, he carried the memories largely in silence.

“I didn’t want to talk about it for a long time,” he said. “Over the past few months, I’ve had a change of heart. I’m trying to come clean with that now.”

Part of that reckoning, he said, came from losing his closest confidant. Tommy Ryan, the same man who stood beside him on the pile when Building 7 came down, died after a fall from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 2017, just short of retirement. “We’d always talk to each other about things that were bothering us,” Rolappe said.

He received a letter in 2002 from then-Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., acknowledging the work he and his fellow ironworkers performed in those first hours and days.

“It just felt good that they acknowledged us,” he said.

He also has photographs from those days, taken on a disposable camera by the crane operator, who had one tucked in the cab. One image he keeps close: himself and Tommy Ryan standing at the pit, carbon filter masks across their faces, surrounded by the still-smoking ruins of the towers that his grandfather’s generation of ironworkers helped build.

Twenty-five years later, the anniversary still catches Rolappe off guard.

“It just doesn’t seem that long ago to me,” he said. “Some of those memories are like yesterday.