You're reading: 400 injured by meteorite falls in Russian Urals

MOSCOW — A meteor streaked across the sky above Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring more than 400 people, many of them hurt by broken glass.

“There
was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going
around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey
Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles)
east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

“We
saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we
heard a really loud thundering sound,” he told The Associated Press by
telephone.

Fragments of the meteor fell in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, the Emergency Ministry said in a statement.

Interior
Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said more than 400 people had
sought medical treatment after the blasts, and at least three had been
hospitalized in serious condition. Many of the injuries were from glass
broken by the explosions.

Kolsenikov also said about 600 square meters (6000 square feet) of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed.

Reports
conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman
for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The Associated Press
that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena
Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a
single meteorite.

Amateur video broadcast on Russian
television showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m.
local time (0320 GMT), leaving a thick white contrail and an intense
flash.

Russian news reports noted that
the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make
the closest recorded pass of an asteroid — about 17,150 miles (28,000
kilometers). There was no immediate demonstrable connection.