Coalmine
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700 injured as meteorite falls in Russian Urals
A major Russian city in Siberia had a miraculous escape on Friday when a meteorite streaked above it, shattering windows, shaking the ground and injuring hundreds of people.
Amateur videos taken in and near Chelyabinsk in the Urals Mountains captured an incredibly bright fireball speeding across the sky shortly after 9 a.m. local time, leaving a thick white smoke trail and followed by several powerful blasts.
Eyewitnesses said the fireball was brighter than Sun, hurting eyesight and causing headaches.
The Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that a 10-tonne meteorite entered the atmosphere over Siberia at a speed of 15-20 km a second and exploded into fragments at a height of about 50 km above the earth.
The fragments hit several regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan, with Chelyabinsk, a city with a population of 1.12 million people about 1,500 km east of Moscow, suffering largest damage. Meteorite shockwaves blew out windows in hundreds of multi-storeyed apartment houses, hospitals, schools and sports facilities and damaged several industrial plants in the city.
No fatalities have been reported so far, but the number of injured people topped 700 by Friday evening, including 160 children, in Chelyabinsk alone. Most injuries were caused by flying glass.
Authorities declared a state of emergency in Chelyabinsk region and deployed 20,000 emergency response personnel to ascertain damage and help the injured people. Municipal services are struggling to replace 100,000 sq. m of smashed windows as temperatures in Siberia are well below zero Celsius.
Fortunately for Chelyabinsk the fragments of the meteorite missed the city and reportedly crashed in a thinly populated area about 200 km away. The military found three meteorite impact sites, including a six-metre crater near Lake Chebarkul and a large hole in the ice on the lake.
Chelyabinsk region has several nuclear and chemical industry facilities, including the Mayak fuel reprocessing factory and a huge nuclear waste storage. Emergency officials said the facilities were safe and background radiation levels remained low. Mayak was the site of a major nuclear catastrophe in the 1950s, when a blast in a liquid waste tank caused massive radioactive contamination in the region.
In this frame grab made from a video done with a dashboard camera, on a highway from Kostanai, Kazakhstan, to Chelyabinsk region, Russia, provided by Nasha Gazeta newspaper, on Friday.
AP In this photo taken with a mobile phone camera, a meteorite contrail is