About 400 people have been injured after a meteor streaked across the sky in central Russia, sending fireballs crashing to Earth, smashing windows and setting off car alarms.
Fragments of the meteor fell on Friday in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, in the Ural Mountains region, the emergency ministry said in a statement.
“A meteorite disintegrated above the Urals [mountain range in central Russia], partially burning up in the lower atmosphere,” the local office of the national emergencies ministry said in a statement.
“Fragments of the meteorite reached Earth, falling in sparsely populated areas in the Chelyabinsk region,” it said.
Residents on their way 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 that is located about 1,500 km east of Moscow.
The meteorite raced 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 phones worked only intermittently.
Chelyabinsk city authorities said about 400 people sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass.
Vadim Kolesnikov, an interior ministry spokesperson, said that most people had sought treatment for injuries from glass broken by the explosions. Kolsenikov also said about 6,000sq ft of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed.
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.
Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across the sky at about 9:20am local time (03:20 GMT), leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.
Television footage showed morning traffic grinding to a quick halt as a blinding flash lit up the blue sky, causing some to huddle in buildings for safety.
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 9.20am. The shockwave could be felt in apartment buildings in the industrial city’s centre.
The emergencies ministry confirmed that cellular telephone communications were temporarily cut in the wake of the incident.
Officials said a part of the meteorite fell 80km from the town of Satki, itself 100km west of the regional centre.
Schools were closed for the day across the region after the impact blew out windows of buildings and temperatures had plunged in central Russia to -18 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit).
Most of those injured were treated for minor cuts and bruises from shattered glass, the local police department told the RIA Novosti news agency.
The Chelyabinsk region is Russia’s industrial heartland, filled with smoke-chugging factories and other huge facilities that include a nuclear power plant and the massive Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.
A spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy state corporation, said that its operations remained unaffected.
The defence ministry said it had sent soldiers “to the sites of impact”, the AFP news agency reported.
