by Rachel Ogbu
A meteor blast across the sky in Russia has injured over 500 people, 67 of whom are children.
It happened today at about 09:22 local time as people made their way to work and school children finished their first lesson.
Right above the Russia’s Ural Mountains, the blast occurred just hours before the asteroid 2012 DA14 passes the earth in the closest ever recorded fly-by of an object of its size, but the European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection.
The blast which was described like “war had broken out” caused explosions and smashing windows with three people reported to be seriously injured.
The blast threw pedestrians to the ground in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city known as a centre for the country’s nuclear energy and weapons programs.
According to a student’s report from School No 461 in Chelyabinsk, where 20 pupils were reported to be injured: “Everything went very bright. There was a very loud sound like the roar of an aeroplane, then an explosion and glass rained down.”
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen every year, but it’s certainly something that happens every decade or so.” He said.
“The bright fireball is not the object burning, it’s the ionising gases in the atmosphere.
“The rock is heated when it reaches the lower levels of the atmosphere from friction and the time lag of the sonic boom from the entry of the object suggests that the object entered the atmosphere at approx 50 km above ground.
Watch videos caught on CCTV:
Writing on a regional web forum, another local resident wrote: “My heart is probably beating 200 beats a minute! I saw this terrible burst of scarlet and orange light. My eyes still hurt… the shock wave knock the glass out of the neighbouring houses. I turned out the light, sat the children on the sofa and waited…my God…I thought war had started.”
By 2pm Moscow time, authorities said that over 500 people had been injured across several regions, although no fatalities have been reported.
Witnesses across several regions of Russia and parts of northern Kazakhstan reported an incredibly bright flash of light followed by a loud sonic boom as the object burst into the atmosphere.
Most injuries appear to have been caused by flying glass from windows shattered by the sonic boom.
Video footage caught by a commuter’s dashboard camera, a precaution used by many drivers against corrupt traffic police, showed a bright light and vapour trail blazing across the sky.
Other footage showed a vast trail across the sky directly over the city, followed minutes later by a powerful series of explosions.
While the consensus is that the explosion was caused by a meteorite, the Russian Army has been put on high alert and nationalist politicians are already suggesting a shadowy foreign plot could be behind the incident.
Vladimir Zhirinkovsky, the leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, lost no time in accusing the Americans of “testing a new weapon” against Russia.
The Chelyabinsk region is home to key parts of Russia’s civilian and military nuclear industry including Mayak, a waste processing facility that saw one of the world’s worst ever nuclear accidents in 1957.
Rosatom, the national nuclear energy monopoly, said that its facilities in the region were unaffected by the blast and “working normally.”
Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said radiation was at ‘normal levels” after the incident.
While no debris from the blast has yet been found, the governor of the Chelyabinsk region was quoted as saying that fragments of the meteor crashed into a lake near the city of Cherbakul, a garrison town west of Chelyabinsk.
Scientists said the explosion was likely caused by an iron-nickel meteorite “meters across” and weighing “several tons.”
Valery Shuvalov, a scientist at Russia’s Institute of Geosphere dynamics, said: “It was destroyed in the atmosphere and the cloud of fragments flew off, creating a shock wave…Much of the material has evaporated, the remaining pieces fell to earth.”
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