By David Caruso
Published: 04 January 2008

A window-washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again.

Alcides Moreno, 37, fell almost 152 meters when scaffolding collapsed on 7 December, killing his brother. Somehow, Mr Moreno lived, and doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center said yesterday that his recovery has been astonishing.

He has movement in all his limbs. He is breathing on his own. And on Christmas Day, he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident.

His wife, Rosario, cried as she thanked the doctors and nurses who kept him alive. "Thank God for the miracle that we had," she said. "He keeps telling me that it just wasn't his time."

Dr Herbert Pardes, the hospital's president, described Mr Moreno's condition when he arrived for treatment as "a complete disaster". Both legs and his right arm and wrist were broken in several places. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column. His brain was bleeding. Everything was bleeding, it seemed.

In the first critical hours, doctors pumped 24 units of donated blood into his body – about twice his entire blood volume. They gave him plasma and platelets and a drug to stimulate clotting and stop the bleeding. They inserted a catheter into his brain to reduce swelling and cut open his abdomen to relieve pressure on his organs.

Mr Moreno was at the edge of consciousness when he was brought in. Doctors sedated him, performed a tracheotomy and put him on a ventilator. His condition was so unstable that doctors worried that even a mild jostle might kill him, so they performed his first surgery without moving him to theater. Nine orthopedic operations followed to piece together his body.

Even when things were at their worst, the hospital's staff marveled at his luck. Mr Moreno's head injuries were minor, for a fall victim. A neurosurgeon, John Boockvar, said he also avoided a paralyzing spinal cord injury, even though he had a shattered vertebra.

"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," said the hospital's chief of surgery, Dr Philip Barie.

New York-Presbyterian has treated people who have tumbled from great heights before, including a patient who survived a 19-story fall, but most of those tales end sadly. The death rate from even a three-story fall is about 50 per cent, Dr Barie said. People who fall more than 10 stories almost never survive.

How you survived such a fall!

thats cool reminds me of that family guy episode

By David Caruso
Published: 04 January 2008

And about the article, is really interesting but not new, there are some cases (only a few) where a man falls from a moving plane, and survives by hitting some trees. It´s not as unusual as you think... improbable but happens from time to time.

10 or 50 story, it makes very little difference. I won't go into much of the physics since it involves a differential equation, and this is, after all, the g. discussion. There's a maximum speed you can get to when you fall through the air, due to kinetic frictions (they're proportional to the square of the speed, and opposite the movement). Therefore, once you reach that terminal speed, you cannot accelerate further. That speed is reached by a skydiver in 3 seconds, the time to travel 20 meters. That's 10 storeys. And this is for a skydiver, starting where the air concentration is lower than at ground level. Therefore, the distance for terminal velocity would be even shorter.

After that, when you reach that velocity, you do not gain any more kinetic energy to "spend" when crash-landing.

I know the physics thing (terminal velocity and such), but you're saying that falling from 15'000 feet out of a plane is the same as falling 15 storeys.

10 or 50 story, it makes very little difference. I won't go into much of the physics since it involves a differential equation, and this is, after all, the g. discussion. There's a maximum speed you can get to when you fall through the air, due to kinetic frictions (they're proportional to the square of the speed, and opposite the movement). Therefore, once you reach that terminal speed, you cannot accelerate further. That speed is reached by a skydiver in 3 seconds, the time to travel 20 meters. That's 10 storeys. And this is for a skydiver, starting where the air concentration is lower than at ground level. Therefore, the distance for terminal velocity would be even shorter.

After that, when you reach that velocity, you do not gain any more kinetic energy to "spend" when crash-landing.

I understand what youre saying, so that means that if this same guy would have fallen the same way even if it had been 100,000ft he would have survived??