Yes, it is a huge thing. People are reporting seeing the meteorite from as far as Yekaterinburg, which is about 200 km away. There are suspisions that there were several meteorites over ~100 km area, and also that when they were exploding they may have broken into several different pieces, and there are verious, yet unconfirmed reports finding a crater and some pieces about 60-80 km from Chelyabinsk.
They already estimate damages exceeding 1B rubles (~30M USD). Some portion of the city is without gas. Chelyabinsk is a large (~1.2M people) cultural, industrial and scientific center. A big problem is that thousands of people have windows blown out. (over 3000 large, multi-apartment buildings, many schools, hospitals and medical clinics) And the weather forecast for tonight is -14 C (7 F). Thanks for all the concerns about my mom. Igor -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
