There is panic in Chelyabinsk. People are picking up children from school, ambulances are on the street, crosses are askew on the church building. PHOTO

15.02.2013 10:59

The explosion in the Urals, the greatest consequences of which were felt by residents of the Chelyabinsk region, caused panic in the capital of the Southern Urals. As a Znak.com correspondent reports, mobile communications do not work for most city residents. Parents are rushing to kindergartens and schools to pick up their children. According to eyewitnesses, there are a lot of children in the courtyards of kindergartens and schools. Perhaps they were taken outside by employees of educational institutions.

A large number of ambulances, especially intensive care vehicles, were seen in the city: apparently many felt ill with their hearts. There are huge traffic jams on the roads.

People on the streets put forward a variety of versions of the emergency, but the military version prevails over all assumptions: people believe that the explosion is connected with planes taking off from the Shagol military air base. In support of this version, eyewitnesses talk about a trail of smoke, the direction of which comes “just from there.”

The windows of many houses were broken. Also, windows were broken in the central office buildings of Chelyabinsk. In the Almond cafe, located in one of the office buildings, the entire window section was knocked out. The shock wave caused cups to overturn on the tables. Glass also flew out at the Yuzhnouralsk State University, the buildings of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the airport, and the oncology center, where several people were injured by shrapnel. On the building of the Alexander Nevsky Church, in which the Organ Hall is located, domes with crosses are askew.

The situation is alarming in other cities in the region. In particular, as readers of Znak.com report, a school building in Kopeisk cracked. There is no official confirmation of this information yet. There is also panic in the city.

Let us recall that astronomers have already given an explanation for the unusual phenomenon. As Znak.com was told at the Kourovka Astronomical Observatory, “nothing terrible happened. This is an ordinary fireball (a meteor with a brightness of at least 4m (brighter than the planet Venus), or having noticeable angular dimensions - editor's note), which wanders in space, sometimes enters the atmosphere and explodes. This happens extremely rarely.” According to experts, the fireball does not fall to Earth; it burns up in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

print version Sergey Kuklev