Meteorite Hits Russia, 1000 injured!

Moscow: Over 1,000 people, including more than 200 children, were injured Friday in a freak incident when a meteor weighing about 10 tons streaked across the sky above Russia's Ural Mountains, creating panic as shockwaves blasted windows and rocked buildings. 
Most of those hurt suffered minor cuts and bruises but some received head injuries, Russian officials said. 

Regional emergency officials blamed the fireball on a 130-tonne asteroid the size of an Olympic swimming pool that was due to pass close to the earth on Friday.

 

The city’s leading priest called the blast of light a “warning” from God, while Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the far-right Liberal Democratic party, dismissed the possibility of a meteor entirely. He blamed “a test of new weapons” by American “instigators of war, saboteurs”.
“Meteors? Nothing ever falls anywhere. Space is the universe – it has its own laws,” he told journalists knowingly.

Russia is no stranger to narratives of meteoric apocalypse. A meteorite that crashed into Siberia in 1908 and wreaked damage over 2,000 sq km was believed by some to herald the 1917 Russian Revolution. The same devastating meteorite takes on apocalyptic significance in the Ice Trilogy of Vladimir Sorokin, Russia’s leading contemporary author.

 

Yet the debris that came hurtling into the earth’s atmosphere at 54,000km an hour on Friday was a different beast, one that caused minor injuries to an estimated 1,000 people, including 150 children, but left Chelyabinsk and the rest of the world in a state of mild shock.

 

By Friday evening there were still no reported fatalities from the scene. However, the emergency ministry said that more than 100 people had been hospitalised. Many of them had been injured after rushing to the window to catch a glimpse of the meteorite’s fantastic fall, only to have the glass shatter on top of them seconds later.

 

On Russian television, locals described seeing a trail of white smoke “like jet streams from a plane”, accompanied by a blinding light and followed by a large boom. The scene, which unfolded at 9.20am, was faithfully captured by amateur video on dozens of dashboard and cellphone cameras.- Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of far-right Liberal Democratic party

The meteorite was visible up to 200km away in Yekaterinburg, and damage from the disintegrating rock was reported as far south as Kazakhstan. Yet most of the wreckage was confined to Chebarkul, a town of 45,000 about 80km west of Chelyabinsk city.

Shockwaves from the debris were so strong they are believed to have knocked in part of the roof and walls of a local zinc plant and shattered the windows of apartment buildings, schools and hospitals, leaving the interiors exposed to the -18C cold.
Scientists are investigating whether a meteorite indeed hit the earth, or whether what locals saw was in fact meteoric debris, the result perhaps of a meteor exploding when it entered the earth’s atmosphere.
Local officials said on Friday that 20,000 rescue workers had been sent to the scene, along with 10,000 police, who would work with experts to look for more craters. As of Friday evening, just one two-metre wide crater had been found, while much of the debris was believed to have fallen into a nearby reservoir.
Despite the damage, the meteorite – and Chelyabinsk – quickly became a running joke on blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
The industrial city has long tried to shake off its reputation as one of Russia’s dirtiest, even going so far as to put out a $10,000 tender for any IT company that could help it optimise web search results, so that phrases such as “radiation in Chelyabinsk” and “dirtiest city on the planet” appeared further down the list.

 

On Friday, one internet meme showed two identical pictures of a dismal-looking city, captioned “Chelyabinsk before meteor shower” and “after meteor shower”.
Another cartoon depicted an alien with the caption: “The inhabitants of the meteorite look in horror at the approach of Chelyabinsk.”