blasts as meteor falls in Russia

[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmStYIVBWsw [/youtube]


Around 950 people were injured on Friday when a meteor burned up
above the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk, unleashing a shockwave
that shattered panes of glass, the regional governor said.

Chelyabinsk regional governor Mikhail Yurevich, quoted by the RIA
Novosti news agency, said that two-thirds of the injuries were light
wounds from pieces of glass and other materials. In the city of
Chelyabinsk alone, 758 people had required medical help, the city said
in a statement on its website, according to AFP.

“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was
going around to people's houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey
Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles)
east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

“We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we
heard a really loud thundering sound,” he told The Associated Press by
telephone.











Another Chelyabinsk resident, Valya
Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out
that the world was ending.

Some meteorites - fragments of the meteor - fell in a reservoir outside
the town of Cherbakul, the regional governor's office said, according to
the ITAR-Tass news agency. It was not immediately clear if any people
were struck by fragments.

Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the
atmosphere because they are traveling much faster than the speed of
sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are
extraordinarily rare.

Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov had earlier said more than
400 people had sought medical treatment after the blasts, and at least
three had been hospitalized in serious condition. Many of the injuries
were from glass broken by the explosions.

Kolesnikov also said about 600 square meters (6000 square feet) of a
roof at a zinc factory had collapsed. There was no immediate
clarification of whether the collapse was caused by meteorites or by a
shock wave from one of the explosions.

Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A
spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The
Associated Press that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry
spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as
saying it was a single meteor.

Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding
across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time (0320 GMT), leaving a thick
white contrail and an intense flash.

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 kilometers).

But the European Space Agency, in a post on its Twitter account, said its experts had determined there was no connection.

Small pieces of space debris - usually parts of comets or asteroids -
that are on a collision course with the Earth are called meteoroids.
When meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere they are called meteors.
Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but if they survive the
frictional heating and strike the surface of the Earth they are called
meteorites.

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.