Left: Pic of Alcides Moreno
Right: Pic of the building he fell from
Alcides Moreno and his brother were cleaning windows when cables connecting their cleaning platform to the roof failed; his brother died
NEW YORK: A window cleaner who survived falling 47 storeys from the roof of a New York skyscraper has made a 'miraculous' recovery – and is walking again.
NEW YORK: A window cleaner who survived falling 47 storeys from the roof of a New York skyscraper has made a 'miraculous' recovery – and is walking again.
Alcides Moreno, a 37-yearold Ecuadorian immigrant, plummeted almost 500 feet when cables connecting his cleaning platform to the roof failed.
His brother, 30-year-old Edgar, was killed, but Alcides survived, and after months of operations and physiotherapy, the only physical reminders of his ordeal are a limp and a long scar on his left leg.
The accident last December left Moreno a critical condition with a collapsed lung, damaged kidneys and bone fractures. During six weeks in hospital he underwent 16 operations and doctors pumped 24 units of blood into his body – about twice his entire blood volume.
On Christmas Day, he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident, and six months on, he is able to walk his dog.
His wife, Rosario Moreno, cried as she thanked the doctors and nurses who kept him alive.
“Thank God for the miracle that we had,” she said after the accident. “He keeps telling me that it just wasn't his time.” Moreno has now returned home, although he requires intensive physiotherapy three times a week. Dr Philip S Barie, chief of critical care at the New York Hospital which treated the window cleaner, said: “Above ten storeys, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue. “This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving.”
