A window washer in San Francisco miraculously survived a fall from the 11^th floor of a tall building at 400 Montgomery. The unnamed worker fell 130 feet to the street beneath and landed on a moving green Toyota Camry.

The washer was rushed to the San Francisco General Hospital with life-threatening wounds. He was with another washer and slipped while preparing their equipment.

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Right after the fall, the driver of the damaged vehicle, Mohammad Alcozai - who was fortunately not injured - and retired Army Col. Sam Hartwell plus several other people in the accident scene called 911, placed traffic blocks and encouraged the injured victim, who was bleeding and had difficulty breathing, to hold on.

Peter Melton, spokesman of the California Department of Industrial Relations, said the washer is lucky to survive the fall which he attributed to the car cushioning his fall from 11 floors.

Hartwell, a retired military man and now a banker, recalled seeing a blue streak falling from the sky. It was followed by a loud noise caused by shattered glass and a body crashing on the metal roof of a car. "It wasn't until the man rolled over onto the pavement and landed on his back that I realized it was a person," The San Francisco Chronicle quotes Hartwell.

Firefighters arrived within two minutes and rushed the washer to the hospital. The man is an employee of Century Window Cleaning of Concord. Melton disclosed that Century had a citation in 2008 for four regulatory breaches in Redwood City involving work procedures and use of equipment. There were no accidents, but Century paid a fine of $2,720.

The San Francisco Chronicle tried to get a comment from Century on Friday but the company did not respond to the newspaper's call.

The driver of the 2002 four-door Camry could have sustained major injuries had his car moved too slow and the worker would have landed on its windshield, instead of its roof and back window which spared Alcozai from injuries.

Window washing accidents have been in the headlines recently, but representatives of the window washing industry insist the job is not that dangerous. Last week, two window washers were stranded for almost two hours while cleaning the newly opened One World Trade Center in New York City when their scaffolding malfunctioned. In October, two washers hang also for about two hours in Oakland. In both scary incidents, there were no injuries.

TagsWindow washers, work accident, skyscrapers, San Francisco