Window cleaner on the mend after 47-storey plunge

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

Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 500 feet after scaffolding collapse, killing his brother who worked beside him.

Doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital have declared his recovery astonishing.

He has movement in all his limbs. He is breathing on his own. And on Christmas Day, he spoke for the first time since the accident which happened on December 7.

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. “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.

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, doctors worried that even a mild jostle might kill him, so they performed his first surgery without moving him to an operating room.

Nine orthopaedic operations followed to piece together his broken body.

Yet, even when things were at their worst, the hospital’s staff marvelled at his luck.

Mr Moreno’s head injuries were relatively minor for a fall victim. Neurosurgeon John Boockvar said the window washer also managed to avoid a paralysing spinal cord injury, even though he suffered 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-storey 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 storeys almost never survive.

“Forty-seven floors is virtually beyond belief,” Dr Pardes said.