Over 400 injured in Meteor terror over Russia

Russia: meteor accident

Russia: meteor accident

A plunging meteor exploded with a blinding flash above central Russia on Friday, sowing panic as the hurtling space debris set off a shockwave that smashed windows and left over 250 people injured.

Morning traffic ground to a sudden halt in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk as the falling meteor partially burned up in the lower atmosphere above the city and lit up the morning sky, television footage showed.

Over 400 people were injured on Friday when a meteor burned up above the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk, unleashing a shock wave that shattered panes of glass, the emergencies ministry said.

“According to preliminary information, over 400 people were injured,” the emergencies ministry said in a statement on its website without saying how many of the injuries were serious.

“At 0920 (0320 GMT) an object was observed above Chelyabinsk which flew by at great speed and left a trail behind. Within two minutes there were two bangs,” regional emergencies official Yuri Burenko said in a statement.

“The shockwave broke glass in Chelyabinsk and a number of other towns in the region,” he said.

Russia: meteor accident
Russia: meteor accident

Initial reports said a part of the meteorite fell 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the town of Satki, itself 100 kilometres west of the regional centre, but this has not been officially confirmed.

“There were thousands of phone calls that something was found and the forest is burning. But there is still no confirmed information that something fell” to the Earth’s surface, said Burenko.

It was not clear if the meteor was linked to the asteroid 2012 DA 14 which is expected to pass about 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometres) above the Earth later Friday in a unusually close approach to the Earth.

The meteor “was quite a large object with a mass of several dozen tonnes,” estimated Russian astronomer Sergei Smirnov of the Pulkovo observatory in an interview with the Rossia 24 channel.

Schools were closed for the day across the region after the shock wave blew out windows of buildings amid temperatures as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit).

The local post service said several of its buildings had been damaged while the stadium of Chelyabinsk’s Traktor ice hockey side was also hit, forcing the cancellation of a match.

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“I was driving in the car across the square. Suddenly the square lit up with a bright, bright light, not a normal light,” said Vasily Rozhko.

“There was literally three or four seconds of bright light, then back to normal. As I could see from the car, this trail appeared. Then when I was driving, the explosion went off,” the resident of Chelyabinsk in central Russia told Russian television

Witnesses of the falling meteor over the Russian Urals spoke of their shock and horror Friday at seeing a giant bright light in the sky that many thought was a crashing plane, followed by a loud explosion that blew out windows in many buildings.

Life News website posted video footage of children screaming in Chelyabinsk School Number 15 corridor and glass and pieces of wood from blown-out windows lying on the floor.

“First there was an unreal light that lit up all the classrooms on the right side of the school. That kind of light doesn’t happen in life, only at the end of the world, then a trail appeared like from a plane but only 10 times bigger,” teacher Valentina Nikolayeva, told Life News.

“First I thought it was a plane falling, but there was no sound from the engine… after a moment a powerful explosion went off,” said another Chelyabinsk witness, Denis Laskov.

“In a lot of the houses on our street the windows were blown out.”

“I was standing in the kitchen at that moment and saw in the sky a very bright flash at a great height. Then there was an explosion, it was so strong that the window opened, I was thrown away from it, and the cactuses that were standing on the windowsill flew all over the kitchen,” Chelyabinsk resident Anton Yemelyanov told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Witnesses posted videos filmed on cell phones showing the flash and the white trail across the blue morning sky.

In one video posted on YouTube, a driver’s dashboard video camera shows a white bright light appearing in the sky, getting brighter and brighter and becoming dazzling before it appears to broaden into a huge explosion as it hits the horizon.

The leader of band Smysloviye Gallyutsinatsii from the Urals main city of Yekaterinburg, Sergei Bobunets wrote on a social networking site that he saw the flash from Yekaterinburg, quoted by local news website Ura.ru.

“I was smoking outside the door when I looked up at the sky and suddenly the sky lit up with a bright light and something that looked like the Sun fell somewhere to the south of Yekaterinburg. Did anyone see it? What was it?” he wrote.

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