Russian meteor: Hundreds injured as falling meteor

Russian meteor: Hundreds injured as falling meteor shatters windows, damages buildings
More than 500 people were injured when a meteor shot across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, sending fireballs crashing to Earth, shattering windows and damaging buildings.


CHELYABINSK, RUSSIA — More than 500 people were injured when a meteor shot across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, sending fireballs crashing to Earth, shattering windows and damaging buildings.
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People heading to work in Chelyabinsk heard what sounded like an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave according to a Reuters correspondent in the industrial city 1,500 km east of Moscow.
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A fireball blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail in its wake which could be seen as far as 200 km away in Yekaterinburg. Car alarms went off, windows shattered and mobile phone networks were interrupted.



“I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day,” said Viktor Prokofiev, 36, a resident of Yekaterinburg in the Urals Mountains.
“I felt like I was blinded by headlights,” he said.
No fatalities were reported but President Vladimir Putin, who was due to host Finance Ministry officials from the Group of 20 nations in Moscow, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev were informed.
A local ministry official said such incidents were extremely rare.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the meteor was travelling at a speed of 30 km per second and that such events were hard to predict. The Interior Ministry said the meteor explosion had cased a sonic boom.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said 514 people had sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass, and that 112 of those were kept in hospital. Search groups were set up to look for the remains of the meteorite.
“There have never been any cases of meteors breaking up at such a low level over Russia before,” said Yuri Burenko, head of the Chelyabinsk branch of the Emergencies Ministry.
Windows were shattered on Chelyabinsk’s central Lenin Street and some of the frames of shop fronts buckled.
A loud noise, resembling an explosion, rang out at around 9:20 a.m. local time. The shockwave could be felt in apartment buildings in the industrial city’s centre.
“I was standing at a bus stop, seeing off my girlfriend,” said Andrei, a local resident who did not give his second name. “Then there was a flash and I saw a trail of smoke across the sky and felt a shockwave that smashed windows.”
A wall was damaged at the Chelyabinsk Zinc Plant but a spokeswoman said there was no environmental threat.
A meteorite is thought to have devastated an area of more than 2,000 sq km in Siberia in 1908, smashing windows as far as 200 km from the point of impact.

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The Emergencies Ministry described Friday’s events as a “meteor shower in the form of fireballs” and said background radiation levels were normal. It urged residents not to panic.
Chelyabinsk city authorities urged people to stay indoors unless they needed to pick up their children from schools and kindergartens. They said what sounded like a blast had been heard at an altitude of 10,000 metres.
Donald Yeomans, manager of U.S. Near Earth Object Program in California, told The Associated Press he thought the event was probably “an exploding fireball event.”
“If the reports of ground damage can be verified, it might suggest an object whose original size was several meters in extent before entering the atmosphere, fragmenting and exploding due to the unequal pressure on the leading side vs. the trailing side (it pancaked and exploded),” Yeoman said in an email to AP.
“It is far too early to provide estimates of the energy released or provide a reliable estimate of the original size,” Yeomans added.
Russian news reports noted that the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid -- about 17,150 miles (28,000 kilometres).
But the European Space Agency, in a post on its Twitter account, said its experts had determined there was no connection.
According to The Associated Press, the dramatic events prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russian political figures. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum, showing that “not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet.”
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, said “It's not meteors falling, it's the test of a new weapon by the Americans,” the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.
“At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies” to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
With files from The Associated Press
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