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.
