The window cleaner who fell from a skyscraper and lived
By Harry Low BBC News
9 March 2017
Only half of the people who fall three storeys survive. From 10 storeys almost no-one does. This is the tale of a window cleaner who survived a 47-floor fall from the roof of a New York skyscraper.
"I loved to see the windows really clean," Alcides Moreno says.
"I liked the water and the soap, how you press the squeegee.
"We would start at the top and clean all the way to the bottom, I loved it."
Moreno and his younger brother Edgar set out to clean the windows of the 47-floor luxury Solow Tower building in Manhattan's Upper East side on the morning of 7 December 2007.
They took the lift up to the top and walked out on to the roof, the temperature hovering around freezing.
But moments later, disaster struck. When they climbed on to the 16ft-wide (4.9m) washing platform the cables holding it in place "slipped from their attachment point", according to the United States Department of Labor accident report.
"On the left side the cable came off first. That was my brother's part. My brother fell off, all the way down," Alcides Moreno says.
Edgar plummeted 472ft (144m), landing in a narrow alley. By the time he reached the ground it's estimated he would have been travelling at more than 120mph. Alcides Moreno's side of the scaffold broke loose soon after, and he too started accelerating towards the ground.
At street level, firefighters and paramedics found a harrowing scene. Edgar Moreno had landed on a wooden fence, his body was severed and he couldn't be helped.
Alcides Moreno was found crouching among a pile of twisted metal, clutching the scaffold controls. Still breathing, he is said to have tried, unsuccessfully, to stand up.
Firefighters recall how they began to move him in small increments "like a fragile egg", knowing that one wrong move could have killed him.
The men's safety harnesses and lifelines, together with some soap and a bucket of hot water - the steam still rising from it - were discovered on the roof next to the scaffold rig.
Alcides Moreno was rushed to a nearby hospital and induced into a coma. He had sustained injuries to his brain, spinal column, chest and abdomen, and had fractures to his ribs, right arm and both legs. He underwent numerous operations, including having a catheter inserted in his brain to reduce swelling. He received 24 pints of blood.
"If you're looking for a medical miracle, this certainly qualifies," Dr Herbert Pardes, the then president and CEO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital told a press conference at the time.
"The survival rate even from a four-storey fall is not very good," Dr Glenn Asaeda from the New York City Fire Department said. "A higher hand was in control here."
Alcides Moreno woke up nearly three weeks later, on Christmas Day 2007, with his wife, Rosario, at his bedside.
"My mind was so blurry," he says.
He has no recollection of the fall itself. Did he know what had happened to his brother?
"I understood that he must be dead because I looked around and saw only me and my wife," he says.
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Alcides Moreno received a substantial compensation payout and he and his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. He says the warm weather there is good for his bones.
"I have all the scars on my body and because of the back injuries, I can't run, only walk," he says. "I'm not like I used to be. But thank God I can walk, that is amazing for me."
Now 46, Moreno says he would clean windows again if he could - he doesn't have a problem with heights. But he doesn't work for health reasons. He estimates that he is 80% of the person he used to be.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39114931