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, a 37-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant, plummeted almost 150 metres (500ft) in a December 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother.

Doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical Centre say Moreno's recovery has been astonishing. He has movement in all his limbs, he is breathing on his own, and on Christmas Day he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident.

His wife, Rosario, 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 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, abdomen and his spinal column. He was bleeding in his brain and throughout his body.

In the first hours, doctors gave him 24 units of donated blood - about twice his entire blood volume - as well as plasma, platelets and a drug to stimulate clotting and stop the haemorrhaging. They put a catheter in his brain to reduce swelling and cut open his abdomen to relieve pressure on his organs.

Moreno was at the edge of consciousness when he was brought in. Doctors sedated him, did a tracheotomy and put him on a ventilator. His condition was so unstable that doctors worried even a mild jostle might kill him, so they performed his first surgery without moving him to an operating room.

Even when things were at their worst, hospital staff marvelled at his luck. Moreno's head injuries were relatively minor for a fall victim. His neurosurgeon, John Boockvar, said the window washer managed to avoid a paralysing spinal cord injury even though he had a shattered vertebra. “If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said the hospital’s chief of surgery, Dr Philip Barie.

The 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-storey fall was about 50 per cent, Barie said, and people who had fallen more than 10 storeys almost never survived.

“Moreno and his brother fell when the platform they were using on an Upper East Side apartment tower broke free.  Edgar, 30, died instantly. Alcides  may have clung to the scaffolding as it dropped, gaining some protection.