Thousands of Russian emergency workers went out yesterday to clear up the damage from a meteor that exploded over the Ural mountains, damaging buildings, shattering windows and showering people with broken glass.
Divers searched a lake near the city of Chelyabinsk, where a hole several metres wide opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large fragments, officials said.
The scarcity of evidence on the ground fuelled scores of conspiracy theories over what caused the fireball and its huge shockwave on Friday in the area which plays host to many defence industry plants.
Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters in Moscow it could have been “war-mongers” in the United States. “It’s not meteors falling. It’s a new weapon being tested by the Americans,” he said.
A priest from near the explosion site called it an act of God. Social media sites were flooded with speculation about what might have caused the explosion.
“Honestly, I would be more inclined to believe that this was some military thing,” said Oksana Trufanova, a local human rights activist.
Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia’s Emergencies Ministry simply replied: “Rubbish”.
Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.
The fireball travelling at a speed of 30 km per second according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200 km away.
Nasa estimated the object was 17 metres across before entering Earth’s atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy – about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War II, Nasa added.
“We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average,” said Paul Chodas of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.