I’m sorry, I know this is WAY off topic, but I have to share. This occurred about 4 hours from my home at a place where my family and I have vacationed many times.
Man Survives 14-Story Fall at Alabama Condo
ORANGE BEACH (Associated Press) – Dangling 14 stories above the ground from the edge of a condominium roof, Mark Waters said he considered himself a goner and prayed he would pass out before hitting the ground.
One long fall later, he found himself still very much alive – in four feet of water in the condo pool – with a few broken ribs and a collapsed lung.
“I’m very fortunate to be alive, and very thankful, and I’m very convinced there is a God,” said Waters, 40, of Buford, Ga., from his room at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola on Wednesday.
“It changes your perspective on things; what’s important: family, friends, God. I know I should be dead. … There must be some purpose for me to be here,” said Waters, who fell Friday and hopes to reunite with his family today in Georgia.
“We really have something to celebrate. This is going to be a wonderful Fourth of July,” said his wife, Debbie Waters.
The whole thing started, Mark Waters said, when he locked himself out of his room on the 10th floor at Tradewinds Condominium on the beach highway in Orange Beach.
He went to the roof to attempt to climb the four stories down to the balcony of his room. He said it wasn’t until he had left the roof and was hanging on its edge that he realized he wasn’t going to make it.
“The rest of the ledges had a lip, and it looked like I could shimmy down and get to the room. … I didn’t see the offset until it was too late and realized the distance was much greater than I thought. At that point, there was nothing to do. I was just holding onto the lip of the roof,” Waters said.
“I knew I was going to fall, and I was hoping I would pass out before I hit the ground,” he said. Unable to hold on any longer, he felt his fingers slip off the ledge and said the rapid descent was “a blur.”
“All I remember is praying, and saying ‘Jesus’ – that is what was going through my head,” he said.
Eyewitness Teresa Ellash of Cincinnati said everyone looked up and saw Waters after his wife started screaming.
Ellash said she saw him fall, “head over foot” into the center of the pool, on his side, in about four feet of water. "It was loud – sounded like a refrigerator hit. More of a boom than a splash.
“It made us all very sick, watching him fall,” Ellash said.
He floated there until some young men dragged him out, and his back was “completely black” with bruises, she said.
“He told the paramedics that he had fallen a long way and that he had been drinking,” she said from Tradewinds on Wednesday, as her family and other witnesses nodded in agreement.
Authorities say Waters is lucky to be alive. Orange Beach Fire Chief Mickey Robinson recalled a recent, similar incident which did not end as well. During Memorial Day weekend, a 19-year-old man fell two stories from a different Orange Beach condo and hit the concrete beside the pool, suffering “massive head trauma” from which he has not fully recovered, Robinson said.
Of Waters, the fire chief said, “If he had fallen a few feet one way or the other, he would have hit the concrete and been killed.”
Assistant Police Chief Greg Duck said Waters had been drinking but the officer did not know Waters’ blood-alcohol content at the time of the fall. Waters declined to comment on how much alcohol he had consumed before climbing onto the roof.
“It’s one of those things you wish you’d never done. I’m going to go home and pretend it never happened,” he said, adding that doctors say they expect a full recovery.
Debbie Waters said she was at the pool with her two children, Tyler, 4, and Rachel, 2, when she looked up and saw her husband hanging from the roof. She thrust the children toward a friend and ran to try to rescue him.
“I was going to try to pull him to safety; I wasn’t going to leave my husband there, just hanging,” she said.
Debbie Waters was on the elevator when she learned from other hotel guests that her spouse had fallen. She returned to the pool, where she saw him stretched out on the concrete, fully conscious.
“I couldn’t believe it. And he was asking if I was all right,” she said.
“We brought our son in to see him, and he told a gentleman that God put a feather under his daddy and floated him into the pool,” Debbie Waters said.
The children returned home with family members on Sunday, and she said they all look forward to being reunited today.
Robinson said people on vacation often take risks they would not normally take – especially if they have been drinking.
“There’s always a safe option,” he said. “People need to come down and have a good time, and we’re here to help them any way we can … but they’ve got to use good, common sense,” he added.
“It’s very difficult for people to understand that you just can’t take those sort of chances. There’s one-in-a-million chance that you’re going to survive something so dangerous. He made that one in a million, and that’s really unheard of,” Robinson added.
