There was also a large one near the San Francisco area Friday night, and possibly another over Cuba. I haven't seen any footage of the Cuban one, so it might be pravada rather than fact, but the one over SF there is plenty of footage of.

Makes me wonder how many others of significant size hit over the oceans and weren't seen.

A meteor often breaks up; it has nothing to do with being struck by a missile and everything to do with the stresses of hitting the atmo at Mach 40!

For me this event represents a profound personal loss. For years, I have always stated "You are more likely to be hit by a meteor from outer space than......" Now that about 1000 people have been dinged by one (albeit indirectly by shattered glass), I must come up with a new expression...Oh,the agony!

There are a lot of great video's of this event. I guess the one take away I passed along to me son on this one was "If you see something that looks like this... don't be standing behind window when the shock wave hits. You might want to cover your ears as well..."

That was while I was showing him the video of the guy who was standing out in front of a 12 story building covered with windows when the the shock wave hit.

seems to me from watching the videos that it really points out the poor building quality / codes in place there contributing to the high injurys from flying glass etc. most of that stuff looked like single pane non safety glass that just broke into flying shards combined with very old unstable brick style buildings. just my 2 cents.

I can't think of many places in N. America where safety glass is the norm in buildings. How many commercial buildings use safety glass? I don't know. But certainly there's little or no safety glass in residential areas aside from cars. Modern glass is arguably tougher, but if the meteor had hit over a populated N. American city there would have been a fair amount of damage and injuries also.

The "shards of glass" problem puts me in mind of the Halifax explosion in 1917. Outside the half-mile radius of total destruction, buildings in a 16 mile radius were destroyed or badly damaged. And then the fires took hold. An enormous amount of injuries were from shattered glass. True to human nature, people went to the window to look at the munition ships on fire in the harbour. It was, arguably, the largest man-made explosion of the pre-nuclear era.

Glass is a major problem in high-rise urban areas during hurricanes. Downtown Houston has been a very dangerous place in every hurricane there.

The problem isn't just retention of the glass but also eliminating debris. Gravel-covered roofs used to be popular until it was realized that a supply of pebbles 60 floors up atop a building meant neighboring buildings would be sand-blasted on the 45th floor, resulting in large pieces of glass falling 450+ feet to the streets below. Oops.

Wow. Not good.

It occurs to me that you're probably talking about tempered glass (not safety glass, which I think of as laminated windshield glass). Tempered glass will certainly take a lot more abuse before it breaks. I have a sunroom on my house, really just a wall of glass with aluminum channelling, and it's made of tempered glass for safety reasons. But I don't know how many building codes really call for it; it's probably only required for specific applications.

that is correct. my bad on the terms used. I just have never seen a tempured glass window shatter in shards like those did. I'm sure the injury rate would be much higher from shards like that seen in the photos.