A man in Moscow looks at a computer screen displaying a picture reportedly taken in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, showing the trail of a falling object above a residential area of the city.
A couple of good resources on the location of nuclear facilities near the meteor strike in Russia.
# Here is a small map from PBS that includes a good overview of what the facilities are used for
# The FInancial Times as a Google map with pins of nuclear sites
# Greenpeace (in Russian) has a detailed map of the sites as well
Chelyabinsk Governor Mikhail Yurevich: "Our main task now is to preserve the heat in offices and homes where windows were shatteted, to prevent the heating system from freezing."
Interfax reports that the Russian Interior Ministry syas it has found three pieces of the meteorite that crashed to the Earth in Russia. Two pieces were found in Chelyabinsk and one in nearby Zlatoust. [map]
Out of the many hundreds or thousands of videos from Russia, this one still sticks -- fast forward to :34 to hear the explosion.
Nurislam Aybulatov, a local Tatar activist in Chebarkul [map] tells RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service:
"Around 8 in the morning we saw a huge explosion above the Chebarkul lake. It felt like an earthquake. There are military bases around and sometimes we hear the arms explosions. First we thought it was the arms explosion. There was also smell of something burnt. There is no damage or injured people in our town."
The latest numbers from Russia are that more than 400 people have been injured -- but with mostly minor injuries. Nine have been hospitalized.
Here's a picture (click photo to enlarge) of what appears to be the same building from earlier today (via RIA Novosti):
One of the better dashcam videos out there. You can really see the burst and the arc of the meteor's trajectory:
The website for the city of Chelyabinsk has some decent pictures of damage from today's strike -- check them out here (text in Russian, of course).
Russian President Vladimir Putin on the event in Chelyabinsk:
"Everything must be done to assess the damage objectively. I spoke to the leadership of Chelyabinsk Oblast just half an hour ago. People are working. Thank God no large objects fell in populated areas, however there were still people who were injured. We need to think about how to help people -- not just to think about it but do it immediately."
"Chelyabinsk Oblast sustained the heaviest damage. As a result of the air wave and other damaging effects, more than 297 houses, 12 schools, several social-service facilities, and a number of industrial enterprises were damaged."
"It was recommended that a number of enterprises stop their work so that workers could go home to assess the damage and take measures to preserve the heat because a lot of windows had been broken. That was a priority task because the temperature was minus 5 Celsius during the day and a further drop in temperature was expected during the night."
