Ten Port Authority workers who heroically carried their paralyzed coworker down 69 flights of stairs on 9/11 — and who received bonus vacation days for their heroism — have had their rewards yanked by the stingy agency.

The story of John Abruzzo’s rescue was one of the uplifting tales to come out of the tragic day, and the special evacuation chair used to get him to safety is even on display at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

But while many “Never Forget,” the Port Authority did, unceremoniously cutting the extra vacation day in 2011 as a cost-cutting measure.

The petty policy has only now become public because one of Abruzzo’s former colleagues recently brought his concerns to the Port Authority — and contacted The Post.

“I just want to them to be remembered,” said the now-retired worker, who was not part of the amazing rescue, but fears it will be lost to history.

The feat unfolded soon after 8:46 a.m., as hijackers barreled American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the 69th-floor comptroller’s office, some saw the plane coming or heard the crash 24 floors above. Michael Fabiano, the agency’s assistant comptroller, remembers nearly flying out of his chair.

Fabiano, who had been in the same office when a terrorist’s bomb shook the towers in 1993, knew what to do — head for the exits. But not before making sure everyone else did, too.

He swept one side of the floor to evacuate colleagues while Margaret Zoch, the agency’s comptroller, took the other side.

Then Fabiano and Zoch gathered with the nine remaining workers on the floor, including one who could not evacuate without them — Abruzzo.

“There was no question,” Zoch said. “We could not leave him.”

Abruzzo, then 41, was in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic since the age of 14 when he injured his spinal cord diving into shallow water at Rockaway Beach.

The Queens resident had worked at the Port Authority since 1982 and when an explosive-packed van blew up in the Trade Center’s garage in 1993, and knocked out power, he was trapped on the 69th floor.

Colleagues “bounced” his heavy electric chair down to the 44th floor, where he was carried out the rest of the way on a stretcher. The process took an interminable six hours.

This time, there was a lightweight evacuation chair at the ready. The Port Authority had purchased them after 1993 for an eventuality it hoped would never come.

The office workers lifted Abruzzo into the chair, which had front wheels and metal runners on the bottom, and began their descent.

With two people in front and two in the back, they were able to slide him down each set of stairs and pivot on the landing to the next set. They took turns, four people at a time.

“You kept having to pick him up and turn, pick him up and turn. It wasn’t just quick,” Fabiano said.

Zoch carried bags and tried to keep up everyone’s spirits.
It was no easy task to maneuver the 6-foot-3, 250-pound Abruzzo.

“The exertion to get me down was tremendous,” he remembered.

They moved to the side to allow others to pass in front of them, and encountered Port Authority police officers coming up the smoky stairwell.

Gerald Simpkins, an accounting supervisor, scouted ahead and decided at the 44th floor to switch stairwells to one he thought had clearer air.

It was a fateful move.

“That stairway is the only stairway that goes to the lobby,” Abruzzo said. If they had remained on the original route, the group could have been trapped at the building’s mezzanine level with no easy way out.

Around the 20th floor, the contingent encountered a group of firefighters bringing in equipment.

“There was like a triage place out in the hallway. And they said, ‘Leave John here, we’ll take care of him.’ We said, ‘No, he’s with us,’ ” Michael Curci, one of the group, said in a 2007 interview.

Abruzzo said he didn’t know that the South Tower was hit or that it had collapsed. Zoch heard over firefighters’ radios that the building was down. It was the location of her brother’s office at Aon insurance and she would not learn his fate until hours later.

Fabiano was in the dark about his wife, who also worked for the Port Authority, a few floors down in the same tower.

The urgency to get out quickly increased.

“Move! Move! Move!” firefighters, doomed themselves, yelled.

When they reached the lobby, the doors were stuck. Abruzzo’s colleagues lifted him out a smashed window to safety.

The exhausting rescue mission had taken them nearly 90 minutes.

They got out with only minutes to spare.

Freelance photographer Bill Biggart captured the workers in their dress shirts with sleeves rolled up carrying Abruzzo over the debris-strewn ground. Biggart died only minutes after taking the famous shots when the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. His body was found four days later along with his crushed cameras and film. His photos were published in Newsweek and exhibited in museums.

Abruzzo said he was across from Stuyvesant High School when the building where he spent his entire career fell to rubble.

“The only thing we saw was the debris cloud coming toward us,” he said. “One of the fellows grabbed the back of my chair, pushed me into the roadway and across the street. There was a sole fireman there who saw us coming over and grabbed the front of the chair and lifted it up onto the curb, and we eventually got into the high school.”

Abruzzo was later taken to the hospital as a precaution. One of his colleagues, Peter Bitwinski, stayed the night with him.

Fabiano and Zoch went to the Port Authority’s technical center in New Jersey. Fabiano’s wife made it out. Zoch’s brother, John Crowe, did not.

The Port Authority honored the 10, and other 9/11 heroes, during a special ceremony at Madison Square Garden nine months after the attacks.

The 10 were among a select group that were given medals, and gifted an extra day’s vacation each year, supposedly in perpetuity.

Abruzzo, who retired from the Port Authority in 2015, said he was happy the people who saved his life were recognized and got the extra time off.

But nine years later, the Port Authority quietly took the day away from 43 valiant workers — including eight of the 10 rescuers still working at the agency.

“They could have found that money somewhere else,” Abruzzo told The Post.

Zoch, who retired in 2003, was unaware the agency reneged on its promise until The Post contacted her last week.

“That wasn’t very nice, was it,” she said.

The Port Authority, when confronted by The Post, would only say that “the loss of these vacation days were part of agency wide reforms enacted in 2011 that applied to all Port Authority employees.”

But PA police officers and other unionized staffers got to keep the bonus day, which had become part of their contracts.

Only three of Abruzzo’s rescue crew are still with the Port Authority — Bitwinski, Simpkins and Anthony Pecora.

Some of the humble heroes did not want to speak to The Post so as not to relive the past or complain.

“They gave us a little award and that’s enough for me. That’s too much,” Fabiano said. “You do it to do what you see is the right thing at the time.”