STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Some buildings in Chelyabinsk lost some or all of their windows in the meteor blast
- About 1,000 people were hurt, most by flying glass, state media report
- Described as once-in-100-years event, the meteor released a 300-kiloton blast
- Five Russian regions, one of them Chelyabinsk, were affected, Itar-Tass says
Chelyabinsk, Russia (CNN) -- A day after a spectacular meteor blast shook Russia's Urals region, the clean-up operation got under way Saturday in the hard-hit Russian city of Chelyabinsk.
Although some buildings escaped unscathed when the sonic waves from the Friday morning explosion reverberated through the city, others lost some or most of their windows.
About 1,000 people were hurt, many by the flying glass, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
The injured included more than 200 children. Most of those hurt are in the Chelyabinsk region, though the vast majority of injuries are not thought to be serious.
The city of Chelyabinsk was functioning normally Saturday as the repair work began.
Many believe it had a lucky escape as fragments of the meteor came raining down.
West of the city, authorities have sealed off a section of a frozen lake where it's believed a sizable meteorite crashed through the ice.
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Described by NASA as a "tiny asteroid," the meteor's explosion created a blast in central Russia equivalent to 300,000 tons of TNT, the space agency's officials said Friday, adding that the incident was a once-in-100-years event.
About 20,000 emergency response workers were mobilized Friday, RIA Novosti reported.
Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov arrived in the city of Chelyabinsk Friday evening to take stock of the situation, the official Itar-Tass news agency reported.
About 3,000 buildings were damaged -- mostly with broken glass -- as a result of the shock waves caused by the blast, RIA Novosti said.
Hospitals, kindergartens and schools were among those affected, Vladimir Stepanov, of the National Center for Emergency Situations at the Russian Interior Ministry
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Amateur video footage showed a bright white streak moving rapidly across the sky, before exploding with an even brighter flash and a deafening bang.
The explosion occurred about 9:20 a.m. local time, as many people were out and about.
It was captured in vivid images by Russians, many of whom used dash cameras inside their vehicles.
Dash cameras are popular in Russia for several reasons including possible disputes over traffic accidents and the corrupt reputations of police in many areas. Drivers install the cameras for their own protection and to document incidents they could be caught in; on Friday, they were able to document a spectacular natural phenomenon.
CNN iReporter and Instagram user Max Chuykov saw the meteor trail from the city of Yekaterinburg. He shared on Instagram that it was "close to the ground."
Witness Ekaterina Shlygina posted to CNN iReport and wrote on Instagram: "Upon Chelyabinsk a huge fireball has exploded. It wasn't an aircraft."
The national space agency, Roscosmos, said scientists believed one meteoroid had entered the atmosphere, where it burned and disintegrated into fragments.
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Five regions of Russia, one of them Chelyabinsk, are thought to have been affected, as well as neighboring Kazakhstan, Itar-Tass said.
"The lower layers of the atmosphere have been increasingly active in the territories of the Tyumen, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions and the Republic of Bashkortostan," it quoted the Emergencies Ministry as saying Friday. "That activity resulted in flashes of light, shock and sonic waves. A meteorite shower is believed to be the cause behind those natural phenomena."
Observers have drawn a parallel with the famous Tunguska event of 1908 in remote Siberia, in which an asteroid entered the atmosphere and exploded, leveling trees over an area of 820 square miles -- about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island.
About 80 million trees were felled, radiating out from the center of the blast, but no crater was left.
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In what astronomers said was an unrelated coincidence, a larger asteroid, called 2012 DA14, passed relatively close to Earth around 2:24 p.m. ET Friday.
Stargazers in Australia, Asia and Eastern Europe could see the asteroid with the aid of a telescope or binoculars but it never got closer than 17,100 miles to our planet's surface.
CNN's Phil Black reported from Chelyabinsk and Laura Smith-Spark wrote in London.
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