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       Joe DeFelice is retired. He doesn’t have to show up at disaster sites eager to help victims begin putting their lives back together, but it’s something he’s good at. He worked for more than 30 years for the hospitality company Aramark, so he knows how to get stuff done.

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       The 72-year-old resident of Calvert County, Md., volunteers with the Red Cross, assisting with disaster relief. Joe has helped tornado victims in Arkansas and hurricane victims in Louisiana — arranging lodging, food and clothing for people who have lost all those things.

       Sometimes, if the time seems right, Joe shares his own stories of loss and coming back from it.

       “If you remember 9/11, that day was a beautiful, beautiful day,” Joe told me. “The sky was blue, the sun was out, then all of a sudden, I heard the roar of the plane and my life changed pretty quickly.”

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       On Sept. 11, 2001, Joe was in his office on the 15th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Aramark ran the observation deck near the top of the skyscraper. It was early, and only a handful of the more than 300 employees Joe oversaw were at work.

       Nobody was sure what had just happened, what was still happening. Joe took an elevator down to the ground level, then followed the crowd through the streets and into the lobby of a building a few blocks away. When the twin towers fell, the lobby filled with debris and Joe moved again, finally ending up on a boat going to a triage center on Liberty Island.

       Joe had survived, but it was clear some Aramark employees had not. He led the team that pored over rosters, went to hospitals and chased down leads to collect an accurate accounting. After four weeks, it was determined that seven Aramark employees had been killed. Five of them had worked for Joe.

       “Aramark set up a big fund and helped every family during that time,” Joe said. “My second big job was trying to place people and find them jobs.”

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       Hundreds of Aramark staffers were out of work. For three months, Joe worked from a hotel room in Jersey City to get each staffer squared away.

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       “It was uncharted waters, as you would suspect,” he said.

       Joe grew up in the hospitality industry in New Haven, Conn., where his father was the chef at a restaurant called the Weathervane and his mother was the manager. Joe got into the stadium catering side of things, running food and beverage for Aramark at the former Providence Civic Center, the Capital Centre outside D.C. and the Forum in Los Angeles.

       Then Aramark bought Ogden Entertainment Services, which ran the observation deck at the World Trade Center, and put him in charge.

       “Two million people visited a year,” he said.

       After 9/11, Joe’s next assignment for Aramark was at the convention center in New Orleans, a city he grew to love.

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       In August 2005, Joe was called back to D.C. for some meetings. While he was away from Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina struck. He couldn’t get back to his house in New Orleans for six weeks. When he returned, he discovered it had flooded.

       “I lost everything,” he said.

       Joe knows what it’s like to come back from catastrophe, which is why, after he retired, he started volunteering with the Red Cross. His first deployment was to Louisiana after Hurricane Laura in 2020. He spent three weeks in a Hyatt hotel in New Orleans taking care of almost 600 people.

       If the time seems right, Joe brings up his past.

       “I tell people who are struggling, who lost everything they own, ‘I hear you. I’ve been through it,’” he said. “I don’t go into great detail, but if they’re suffering, I can connect. I know what to say or what not to say.”

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       Joe still carries his World Trade Center ID in his wallet. The memories of that September morning never really go away, especially at this time of year. Burned into his memory is the image of a man and a woman holding hands and jumping.

       “That will never leave me,” he said. “And the roar of the planes will never leave me. It took me a while. I struggled for a good two years. Sometimes I’d be driving and I’d start crying. I was dealing with a lot. That’s why I try to find a purpose. These last few years going to these disasters and helping people makes me feel tremendous.”

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