You’ve taken up a job as a New York City window washer.
Congratulations, it’s an honourable profession.
Sure, you can be performing death-defying feats of cleaning for a starting wage as little
as twelve dollars an hour.
But underappreciated as you are, you have a vital job – and you’re more committed
to maintaining transparency than most world governments.
On your first day, you face a daunting challenge: Cleaning the windows on the 47th floor of
a New York City skyscraper.
Hope you’re not afraid of heights.
But, while you’re busy being the thin Windex line between cleanliness and grime, disaster
strikes: You lose your footing, and tumble 472 feet/ 144 metres to the unforgiving concrete
below.
You probably assume your next stop is being scraped-up and power-washed into a gutter,
but nope!
You survived.
You will live to wash windows another day.
Seems far-fetched, right?
But this actually happened to 37-year-old veteran New York window washer Alcides Moreno
in 2007.
We’re going to tell you the incredible story of how he survived the seemingly un-survivable
today.
First, let’s talk about Moreno.
He arrived in the US from Ecuador in the 1990s with his wife, Rosario, and his three children.
This is a man who’s truly committed to his job, and more than that, he downright loves
it.
When interviewed about his profession after his life-defining accident, he said “I loved
to see the windows really clean.
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.”
It was with this intensely positive mindset that he and his younger brother, 30-year-old
Edgar Moreno, took on the Solow Tower apartment block in Manhattan’s Upper-East Side.
At 50 stories and 689 feet/ 210 metres, it’s a formidable structure, though still only
the 71st tallest building in New York.
The Moreno brothers took the elevator to the top floor with all their equipment.
The roof was dizzyingly high, even for these experienced window-washers.
The temperature was freezing.
The air was thin.
But this was nothing unusual for this line of work, so they just got on with it.
Alcides and Edgar Moreno climbed onto their 16-foot-wide/ 4.9-metre-wide, 1,250-pound
cleaning platform and prepared for another honest day’s work.
But this wasn’t just any other day – a nightmarish disaster was about to strike.
When the two brothers climbed onto the platform – forgetting to first put on and fasten
their safety harnesses – the powerful cables that held the whole operation in place came
dangerously loose.
First, the cable on the left side – the side where Edgar Moreno was standing – came
free, causing the entire platform to droop on one side and fling Edgar off of the platform
entirely.
Sadly, this isn’t the inspiring tale of how two brothers survived a terrifying situation.
Edgar fell 472 feet/ 144 metres, reaching speeds of around 120 miles-per-hour / 193
kilometres-per-hour before landing in a narrow alley.
He landed on a wooden fence, severing his body in two and killing him instantly.
Edgar’s death is one the 420,000 deaths that occur through falling every single year.
It’s one of the more common accidental ways to die.
But Alcides didn’t even have time to think about this, his mind was more focused on his
own seemingly-imminent mortality.
His side of the scaffolding came loose and began to hurtle down towards the ground like
a screaming comet.
However, unlike the tragic end of his brother, firefighters found Alcides alive in the hunk
of twisted metal that was once the window-washing platform.
Crouched down, fingers twisted in a death grip around the platform, having survived
by virtue of not striking his head during the fall.
According to witness reports, Alcides even attempted to stand.
The first-responders were as amazed as they were baffled to find him alive, but Alcides
was still in grave danger.
He may have survived the fall, but it wasn’t by much.
While he was certainly luckier than Edgar, his injuries were nonetheless extensive and
life-threatening.
Alcides had suffered a traumatic head injury that left him with brain damage, as well as
damage to his neck, spinal column, chest, and abdomen.
He also had fractures to his right arm, ribs, and both legs.
Alcides was practically on the edge of death.
The firefighters slowly and gently handled him into a vehicle for transport to a nearby
hospital four blocks away.
When Alcides arrived at the hospital, he was given extensive treatment for his injuries.
He was put into an induced coma, and had a catheter inserted into his brain to reduce
dangerous swelling.
The doctors cut open his abdomen in order to relieve the pressure on his organs.
He was also transfused twenty-four pints of donated blood, which is around twice his entire
blood volume.
But the treatments didn’t stop there.
He was also given nineteen pints of plasma, platelets, and a drug to stimulate blood-clotting
in order to reduce his life-threatening haemorrhaging.
He was also given a tracheotomy surgery and a ventilator in his throat, as well as nine
different orthopaedic surgeries.
Alcides’ condition was so fragile throughout most of this process that the doctors couldn’t
even move him into the operating theatre.
When later discussing the nature of Alcides’ recovery, Dr. Herbert Pardes – who was president
and CEO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital at the time – said, “If you're looking
for a medical miracle, this certainly qualifies.”
And Dr. Pardes wasn’t exaggerating here, either.
According to the chief surgeon of New York-Presbyterian, Dr. Phillip Barie, the death rate from falling
three stories is around fifty percent.
At ten stories, the amount of people who survive are statistically insignificant.
Alcides was a complete, statistical outlier.
Alcides Moreno remained in his medically-induced coma for three weeks.
He finally spoke on December 7th of 2007, to Rosario, who’d remained in his room and
kept him company throughout the recovery process.
Because of the head trauma Alcides experienced, he didn’t even remember the accident happening.
He did, however, deduce that his brother had died.
Still, in spite of his brother’s tragic death, Alcides Moreno was lucky to be alive
after the whole ordeal.
After a few more spinal surgeries and another surgery to help reconstruct his abdominal
wall, he’d almost fully recovered.
Naturally, the authorities looked into what might have caused this accident in the first
place.
The investigations into the circumstances of the incident found that the platform and
cables hadn’t been properly maintained over time.
And the new motorised cables, responsible for lowering the platform down the side of
the building, hadn’t been properly anchored to the top of the building.
It was a perfect recipe for the worst-case scenario.
Initially, the investigators also placed some of the responsibility for the accident on
Alcides and Edgar - Claiming that the fact they weren’t wearing their harnesses during
the accident made them at least somewhat culpable for what happened.
However, this line of reasoning was later dropped, because the investigators couldn’t
prove that the brothers weren’t just testing the platform before applying their harnesses
and getting back on.
Anyway, back to the story.
The real question on everyone’s mind right now is how Alcides Moreno survived falling
472 feet/ 144 metres from the 47th floor of the Solow Building.
The answer is honestly still unclear – many doctors and first-responders believe that,
by all rights, Alcides should absolutely be dead right now.
But some possibilities can be found in science, and in Moreno’s basic window washer training.
When asked about why he thought he was able to survive his ordeal, he credited the fact
he was trained to lay flat to the platform and cling onto it during his sudden descent
towards the New York City streets below.
The much larger surface area of the platform Alcides was clinging to likely offered air
resistance that slowed the speed of his descent, compared to his brother.
Edgar’s relatively small surface area had him fire down towards the earth like a bullet
with little resistance.
The physics of air resistance gave Alcides a fighting chance against the forces of gravity.
Some speculated that perhaps the platform bounced against one of the surrounding buildings,
slowing the fall, though this was never conclusively proved.
The platform itself may have also acted as a kind of buffer between the force of the
crash and Alcides’ body, both dampening the overall force and distributing it evenly
across his body.
Edgar, on the other hand, took the full force himself on the razor-edge of a fence, essentially
assuring catastrophic physical damage.
Alcides and Edgar essentially provide perfect examples of ideal and nightmare scenarios
for falling from a great height without a parachute.
We can look at a few similar examples to see if they provide any answers for how someone
could survive such an insane fall.
Joshua Hanson, a bar owner from Wisconsin, drunkenly crashed out of the window of a Minneapolis
hotel’s seventeenth floor.
Hanson suffered a broken leg and a collapsed lung, but walked away fine from the hospital
a week later.
This is still a miraculous feat of survival, but Alcides fell thirty floors more, so it’s
a little difficult to compare the two.
Likewise, Tim Stilwell is thankfully still well after falling from the roof of his apartment
building in 2013.
His fall was broken by the roof of a nearby building, allowing him to survive with some
broken bones.
While having a more solid scientific answer would certainly be more satisfying than maintaining
the mystery, the fact is, the greatest factor in surviving any insane fall is pure luck.
There is no one solid, logical reason that Alcides Morena was able to survive his 47-story
fall, baffling everyone from scientists to doctors to first responders.
Alcides and Rosario attribute a lot of his tremendous luck to the grace of God, owing
to the fact that Alcides, in the words of Rosario, has never wished anything bad on
anyone.
In the aftermath of the incident, Edgar Morena was buried in the brothers’ home country
of Ecuador.
In the few years following, Alcides struggled greatly with survivor’s guilt.
He’d been close with his brother his whole life – the two of them having lived together
in New Jersey and worked as a team since the early 1990s.
Alcides said “Losing him was a big deal for me…I believe I felt melancholic for
about three years.
That's how long it took me to recover and accept his death.
It was like losing a child, because he was younger than me.”
While nothing could bring back Alcides’ brother, he did at least achieve some financial
justice for the company that caused his death.
Rather than implicating Alcides and Edgar in their own tragedy, a Manhattan Supreme
Court Judge ruled in their favour, finding Tractel – the company responsible for installing
the safety features on the window-washing platform – liable for poorly installing
the motorised cables.
They also found that the Solow building was liable for its inadequate safety features.
As a result, the two entities settled the matter with Alcides out of court for a large
sum of money.
Alcides Morena has since moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and had a fourth child with Rosario.
Morena has said that the warm, dry air in Arizona is better for his bones, but he still
misses the people of New York City.
He no longer works for health reasons, but has maintained that he doesn’t have a fear
of heights because of the incident.
Looking back on his experience, Alcides said, “I have all the scars on my body and because
of the back injuries, I can't run, only walk.
I'm not like I used to be.
But thank God I can walk, that is amazing for me.”
And Alcides has put his life and his ability to walk to good use.
In the years since his accident, he’s supported his children in going to college and taken
part in 5K runs for charity.
While he has said that life could never truly be the same, he’s regained around eighty
percent of the person he used to be.
And for someone who fell to what seemed like certain death from the top of a 50-story building,
eighty percent is honestly pretty darn good.
Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics Show!
If you’re looking forward to falling for even more of our content about amazing survival
situations, why not check out “Plane Crash Leads To Unbelievable Survival Story” and
“Survival Tips That Will One Day Save Your Life.”
In the meantime, watch your step.
It’s a long way down from here.