By Maria Álvarez
Newsday
Copyright 2007 Newsday, Inc.
NEW YORK — New York Fire Department paramedic Gary Smiley sees miracles all the time, both in the face of tragedies he witnesses on the job and through the eyes of children when he and other paramedics play Santa Claus during their off-hours, as they have for 17 years.
This Christmas season, Smiley celebrates a special miracle: the survival of window-washer Alcides Moreno, 37, who plummeted 47 stories when the scaffold he and his brother were working on outside an East Side building gave way.
Smiley, 43, and his partner, Jose Cruz, had a crucial role that day, the morning of Dec. 7.
Within minutes of the 911 call shortly before 10 a.m., the paramedic duo sped south from 96th Street to the high-rise apartment building on East 66th Street. They arrived to see a heap of razor wire, concrete and steel, and the body of Edgar Moreno, Alcides’ brother, who had fallen onto a concrete wall.
“It was shocking. It was a very horrible scene to see,” Smiley said. “The steel and iron bars were covered in blood.”
Smiley, Cruz and a firefighter moved quickly, crawling through the debris. They spotted a pair of legs, and as they drew closer, saw Alcides Moreno, sitting atop what remained of the scaffold’s platform.
“I saw the metal motor to the scaffolding, and to my surprise there he was, sitting up, with his hands to his chest,” Smiley said. “We had him out in five minutes.
“He must have held onto the scaffolding as it fell - taking the force of the impact,” he said. “It was fantastic to see him alive.”
Three weeks later, Smiley still can’t believe Moreno survived the 500-foot fall.
“That’s a fatal height - 20 feet is fatal,” he said. Moreno, who lives in New Jersey, continues to cling to life, in critical condition, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“It’s like that - you see something gruesome and then you see life,” said Smiley, a father of two who lives on Staten Island and is one of 48 elite paramedics assigned to the FDNY’s Task Force One unit.
The unit, a first-response medical team created after the Sept. 11, terrorist attack, gives “crush medicine” to victims trapped in building collapses and construction site cave-ins, and those pinned beneath subway trains. The team’s members are trained to give victims intravenous fluids and other medications to flush out blood that has lost its oxygen as they wait to be rescued.
That’s a scenario Smiley knows from personal experience. On a search team on Sept. 11, he was trapped under the trade center’s debris for about 90 minutes, and one of his legs injured, before he was freed.
To balance tragedy with joy, throughout his career Smiley has made an annual Christmas rite of delivering toys and clothing to needy Brooklyn kids.
“I just think Christmas is a real cool holiday,” said Smiley, who is Jewish and was born and raised in Sheepshead Bay. “I have a little Italian,” he said, grinning.
For 17 years, he and other paramedics have answered letters to Santa Claus via the U.S. Postal Service’s 90-year-old “Operation Santa Claus” program.
“I try to read all the letters in the Brooklyn box. The letters rip your heart out,” Smiley said.
One 13-year-old girl “who loves to read did not ask for toys. She just wanted a bookcase,” he said. “Another came from a mom whose 7-year-old daughter doesn’t want to go to school because she only has two sets of clothes and the kids make fun of her.
“We made sure that she got two weeks’ worth of outfits,” said Smiley, who marvels that families and children rarely ask for expensive toys. One 6-year-old boy just wanted a pair of boots.
The gift drive, totaling several thousand dollars, comes from individual donations from FDNY colleagues. The paramedics shop and wrap the gifts themselves and dress up an ambulance in wrapping paper and a bow. Inside the family’s homes, paramedics dressed as Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, Rudolph and several elves deliver the gifts.
“The families just have this blank look ... They are just in shock” when the crew arrives, Smiley said.
“And then the kids are just amazed when they see their letters pulled out by Santa Claus. At that moment, Santa exists - and there is nothing cooler than that.”