Russia sends clean-up team to meteorite-hit Urals

BBC News online - 15 February 2013

The BBC's Daniel Sandford says people described a ball of fire in the sky

A 20,000-strong team has been sent to the Ural mountains as part of a rescue and clean-up operation after Friday's meteor strike, Russia's emergency, ministry says.

President Vladimir Putin ordered the operation to help some 1,200 people who were injured, including 200 children, mostly by shattered glass.

The shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings around Chelyabinsk.
A fireball streaked through the clear morning sky, followed by loud bangs.

A large meteorite landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in Chelyabinsk region, and Friday morning's dramatic passage was witnessed hundreds of kilometres away.

Mr Putin said he thanked God that no big fragments of the 10-tonne meteor - which was thought to be made of iron and travelling at some 30 km (19 miles) per second - had fallen in populated areas.

It had entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke apart 30-50 km (20-30 miles) above ground, according to Russia's Academy of Sciences, releasing several kilotonnes of energy - the equivalent of a small atomic weapon.

The Emergencies Ministry urged calm, saying background radiation levels were normal after what it described as a "meteorite shower in the form of fireballs".

"The explosion was so strong that some windows in our building and in the buildings that are across the road and in the city in general, the windows broke," Chelyabinsk resident Polina Zolotarevskaya told BBC News.

The Chelyabinsk region, about 1,500km east of Moscow, is home to many factories, a nuclear power plant and the Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.

Asteroids, meteors and meteorites

• Asteroids are small bodies that orbit the Sun as the Earth does
• Larger asteroids are called planetoids or minor planets, smaller ones often called meteoroids
• Once any of these enters our planet's atmosphere, it becomes a meteor
• Many meteors break into pieces or burn up entirely as they speed through the atmosphere
• Once meteors or fragments actually hits the earth, they become meteorites

Many children were at lessons when the meteor fell at around 09:20 (03:20 GMT).

Video posted online showed frightened, screaming youngsters at one Chelyabinsk school, where corridors were littered with broken glass.

Chelyabinsk resident Sergei Serskov told BBC News the city had felt like a "war zone" for 20 to 30 minutes.

"I was in the office when suddenly I saw a really bright flash in the window in front of me," he said.

Footage shows an icy lake near Chebarkul, where police say part of the meteor landed

"Then I smelt fumes. I looked out the window and saw a huge line of smoke, like you get from a plane but many times bigger."

"A few minutes later the window suddenly came open and there was a huge explosion, followed by lots of little explosions."

Debris also reportedly fell on the west Siberian region of Tyumen.
Governor Yurevich reported that a meteorite had landed in a lake 1km outside Chebarkul, which has a population of 46,000.

A Russian army spokesman said a crater 6m (20ft) wide had been found on the shore of the lake.
Scientists have played down suggestions that there is any link between the event in the Urals and 2012 DA14, an asteroid which raced past the Earth later on Friday at a distance of just 27,700km (17,200 miles) - the closest ever for an object of that size.

Such meteor strikes are rare in Russia but one is thought to have devastated an area of more than 2,000 sq km (770 sq m) in Siberia in 1908.