One resident of the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural mountains, said: ‘I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day. I felt like I was blinded by headlights.’
Some believed the world was ending and video footage posted online showed screaming youngsters at a school where corridors were littered with broken glass.
Gulnara Dudka, a resident of Chelyabinsk, 930 miles east of Moscow and the biggest city in the affected region, said: ‘I really thought it was doomsday.’
Teacher Valentina Nikolayeva, who tried to protect her pupils from the force of the blast said: ‘There was an unreal light that lit up all the classrooms.
‘That kind of light doesn’t happen in life, only at the end of the world – then a trail appeared like from a plane but only ten times bigger.’
The emergencies ministry said that more than 20,000 rescue workers had been dispatched to locate and help those injured in Russia’s industrial heartland and an area that houses nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.
Amazingly, there were no fatalities and most of the wounded were hurt by flying glass – some 1.8million square feet of which will have to be replaced.
Russian news networks noted that the meteor struck just hours before the Earth was due its closest recorded shave with an asteroid.
However, space experts said the arrival of the much larger asteroid was merely a coincidence.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, of Queens University Belfast, said there was ‘almost definitely’ no connection between the exploding meteor and asteroid 2012 DA14.
‘This is literally a cosmic coincidence, although a spectacular one,’ he said.
Russia’s emergencies ministry described the event as ‘a meteor shower in the form of fireballs’ and urged residents not to panic.
Prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said the meteor could be a symbol for the vulnerability of the economy – and the ‘whole planet’.
Meanwhile, the deputy prime minister quashed suggestions that the military had tried to shoot the meteor out of the sky, saying that, as yet, no one has the technology.
And Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken nationalist leader, said: ‘It’s not meteors falling. It’s the test of a new weapon by the Americans.’
British experts said that thousands of tons of material from space rains down on the Earth each day, but nearly all of it burns up and disintegrates far from the view of the naked eye.
Occasionally a meteor can come so close that its explosion is felt, as happened yesterday, or a small meteorite or large asteroid can actually hit the planet.
Dr Simon Goodwin, an astrophysicist from Sheffield University, said: ‘While events this big are rare, an impact that could cause damage and death could happen every century or so.
'It very much depends on where it hits. A big enough meteor could cause significant immediate death and maybe cause climate change by releasing dust into the air – these are maybe every few thousand years.
‘And a really big impact occurs every few ten millions of years and can cause mass extinctions. One killed the dinosaurs.
‘Scientifically this is not hugely interesting. Probably its greatest importance is to make people realise that things fall from space all the time, and every now and then they can be dangerous.
‘And an impact in a heavily populated area could kill huge numbers of people with no warning or chance of stopping it.'
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