City hit by meteor looks to Moscow

Divers search lake for space-rock bits

A local resident repairs a window broken by a shock wave from a meteor explosion in Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow,  Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more. (AP Photo/Boris Kaulin)

A local resident repairs a window broken by a shock wave from a meteor explosion in Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more. (AP Photo/Boris Kaulin)

Sunday, February 17, 2013

— The big blast from outer space was still reverberating in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Saturday, as glaziers went to work replacing windows, divers vainly sought meteorite fragments at the bottom of a lake, doctors tended the wounded, residents found new ways to doubt the authorities, and seemingly everyone looked expectantly to Moscow for the flood of cash that rolls in on the heels of catastrophe.


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Regional Gov. Mikhail Yurevich felt the need to deny that some residents had broken their own windows in the aftermath of Friday’s meteor to qualify for financial assistance. Even if that were true, though, it would be small potatoes compared with the compensation in store.

As early as Friday evening, the governor had announced that, throughout the city, more than 200,000 square yards of glass would have to be replaced. That’s just about 50 acres’ worth - all of it paid for by the government. That no one could have made such a calculation with any degree of accuracy in just a few hours was beside the point. Here was an unexpected opportunity to place a very large order.

Yurevich estimated the total damage at $33 million, but several officials suggested that figure will rise.

“‘Force majeure’ circumstances are always a gift to the authorities,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a leading political consultant in Moscow, “because you can just write off everything that’s stolen.”

Mere hours after the meteor streaked across the sky and then broke into pieces with devastating force, Dmitry Rogozin, a deputy prime minister, pushed for plans for a terrestrial defense system to protect against future meteors, asteroids and comets and their sonic booms. As of Friday night, Pavlovsky said, government scientists were saying those plans would cost about $2 billion, but on Saturday morning, “after Moscow woke up,” the projected price tag had doubled.

About 40 people remained in hospitals Saturday, out of 1,200 who had sought treatment for injuries; one woman was evacuated to Moscow in serious condition. Yurevich was not the only person to observe that it was close to a miracle no one had been killed by flying glass.

At School No. 37 in Chelyabinsk, a quick-thinking substitute teacher, Yulia Karbysheva, got all 44 of her fourth- graders out of harm’s way as the meteor lit up the sky, the Interfax news agency reported. After the intense bright flash of its explosion, the children rushed to the windows, but before the shock wave could hit, she commanded them to get under their desks.

Karbysheva herself was then showered with glass and debris, but the children were unharmed. With a cut to a tendon in her left hand and a gash on her left thigh, she led her class to safety outdoors. The doctor treating her Saturday at Hospital No. 9 told Interfax she would recover.

Although parts of a wall and roof at a zinc factory collapsed, the most badly damaged building in the city was the Ice Palace, a skating arena. The governor said it will require at least $6 million in publicly financed repairs.

About 20,000 police and emergency workers were mobilized to get the city and region back in order. A team of nine glaziers flew in from the city of Tyumen to help with the windows.

Meanwhile, with a perfectly round hole about 20 feet across having suddenly appeared in a frozen lake outside Chelyabinsk city, divers went searching for meteorite fragments.

“It was eerie,” Alyona V. Borchininova, a barmaid who followed the light’s path to the lakefront, said of the hole Saturday. “So we stood there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.’”

As the sun rose Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling in the sun like a million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the site, apparently related to the work of divers, but the lake yielded little to shed light on the mystery.

Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites the government believes felt a significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir Puchkov,told Interfax.

Puchkov later said divers found nothing on the lake bed, but he did not rule out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.

“Experts are studying all possible places of impact,” he said. “We have no reports of confirmed discoveries.”

NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska, it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a size that strikes the Earth about once every 100 years.

If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely, they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees of Siberia, now blanketed in snow.

The discovery of a confirmed fragment could help scientists better apprehend the composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to descending farther before exploding from the heat, or of hitting the surface, potentially causing vastly more casualties.

The meteor, traveling at about 40,000 miles an hour, unleashed the energy of 20 Hiroshima-size bombs as it detonated in the atmosphere.

Shortly afterward, a military spokesman told news services that it had been shot down by an air defense unit. Later, an official with the Ministry of Emergency Situations said that text-message alerts had been sent out before the big blast. Neither assertion was true; both drew strong criticism and mockery online.

The text-message claim seems to have been inspired by the failure of officials last summer to warn residents of Krymsk, in southern Russia, of a flood they knew was coming.

Remarkably, the Ministry of Emergency Situations announced Friday night that the offending official - unnamed- had been fired.

Sergei Parkhomenko, a former science editor turned political writer, speaking on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, said authorities had lived up to popular expectations.

“As we can see, the first reaction is this: ‘Everybody lies,’” he said. “The second: ‘Everything is stolen.’ That’s what we hear in response to various statements by all officials - local, regional and federal. People are treated with great disdain, and there is a huge variety of fantasies, fears, some panic and so on. Why is this happening? From distrust.”

Of course, a meteor streaking in unbidden from space on an otherwise normal day to shower destruction on a city of more than 1 million was unnerving enough on its own.

It was “the Lord’s message to humanity,” said Feofan, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan of Chelyabinsk and Zlatoust, in a statement reported by the RIA Novosti agency.

In the Church of the Transfiguration in Chebarkul, on a hill overlooking the lake, Deacon Sergiy was in midservice on Friday - having just closed the doors in the iconostasis, a wall of icons in Orthodox churches. He had reached the portion of the liturgy symbolizing the entombment of Jesus in the holy sepulcher, and the imminence of the resurrection. Just then, a bright light spilled in through every window.

“It was like a new sun was born,” he said.

“This all gives us reason to think,” he said. “Is the purpose of our life just to raise a family and die, or is it to live eternally? It was a reason for people on Earth to look up, to look up at God.”

He called the flash more significant than earlier signs, like the time a white dove alighted on the church belfry,or when a cloud appeared above the church in the form of a cross.

Out on the lake, an ice fisherman, who gave his name only as Dmitri, shrugged off the event. “A meteor fell,” he said. “So what? Who knows what can fall out of the sky. It didn’t hit anybody, that is the important thing,” Meanwhile, the meteor that rattled Siberia on Friday suddenly brought new life to scientific efforts to deploy adequate detection tools, in particular a space telescope that would scan the solar system for dangers.

A group of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who helped build thriving companies such as eBay, Google and Facebook has already put millions of dollars into the effort and saw Friday’s shock wave as a turning point in raising hundreds of millions more.

“Wouldn’t it be silly if we got wiped out because we weren’t looking?” said Dr. Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive who leads the detection effort. “This is a wake-up call from space. We’ve got to pay attention to what’s out there.”

Astronomers know of no asteroids or comets that represent a major threat to the planet. But NASA estimates that fewer than 10 percent of the big dangers have been discovered.

Lu’s group, called the B612 Foundation after the imaginary asteroid on which the Little Prince lived, is one team of several pursuing ways to ward off extraterrestrial threats. NASA is another, and other private groups are emerging, such as Planetary Resources, which wants not only to identify asteroids near Earth but also to mine them.

“Our job is to be the first line of defense, and we take that very seriously,” Dr. James Green, the director of planetary science at NASA headquarters, said in an interview Friday after the Russian strike. “No one living on this planet has ever before been hurt.That’s historic.”

Green added that the Russian episode was sure to energize the field and that an even analysis of the meteor’s remains could help reveal clues about future threats.

“Our scientists are excited,” he said. “Russian planetary scientists are already collecting meteorites from this event.” Information for this article was contributed by Will Englund of The Washington Post; and by Andrew E. Kramer and William J. Broad of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/17/2013