Miss Fidget.com

Though seriously injured, a man survived a fall of 47 stories, which is amazing but not record breaking. Though his fall happened some time ago, he’s back in the news of late as he’s felling better and  doing well in rehab.

Parachutists who’ve suffered equipment failures have survived falls from far greater heights. The most amazing such story I’ve read was of a parachutist whose gear was attacked by a pair of golden eagles as she fell. Bravely the woman tried to fight off the birds, one of whom got tangled in her lines. Her chute failed. She landed hard and lived to tell the tale.

Window washer falls 47 stories … and lives
USA Today | January 4, 2008

Alcides Moreno fell 47 stories and lived to tell the tale.

The window washer rode a 16-foot scaffold as it careered down the side of a skyscraper and crashed into the alley nearly 500 feet below.

His brother, Edgar, died in the Dec. 7 accident. But now, less than a month later, Alcides is alive and alert. He’s chatting with relatives. And doctors say they expect him to walk at the end of a year-long course of physical therapy.

“Thank God for this miracle that we’ve had,” his wife, Rosario, tells reporters, according to the New York Post.

The hospital says it was touch-and-go for quite a while, with Moreno receiving 24 units of blood and undergoing more than a dozen surgeries while doctors kept him in a medically induced coma.

“If you’re a believer in miracles, this would be one,” says Dr. Philip Barie, chief of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, according to the Daily News. “I’ve seen it all - or at least I think I have - until something like this happens.”

Authorities are investigating the cause of the accident. No one’s sure how Alcides survived the fall, leading us to conclude that it was the Miracle on 66th Street.

“This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don’t open and somehow they manage to survive,” Barie tells The New York Times. “We’re talking about tiny, tiny percentages, well under 1%, of people who fall that distance and survive.”

(Photo taken Dec. 7 by Tina Fineberg, AP.)