New York window washer survived falling 47 stories

In 2007, Alcides Moreno defied death on a cold morning. At age 37, he and Edgar, his brother, were sent to wash the dark glass face of Solow Tower at 265 E. 66th St. They had just stepped off the roof onto the scaffold when it collapsed.

Edgar toppled off the 1,250-pound scaffold, tumbling at a speed estimated at up to 124 mph. He hit the top of a brick wall and was killed. 

But Alcides clung to the aluminum platform, like a surfboard in the sky. It created wind resistance that aided perhaps by a random air current rising between the buildings slowed his descent, physicists surmised. It also blunted the force of crashing into a concrete alley.

But doctors and scientists were still stumped.

“Fifty percent of people who fall four to five stories die. By the time you reach 10 or 11 stories, just about everyone dies,” Dr. Sheldon Teperman, director of trauma and critical-care surgery at Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx, said at the time.

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