Meteor Through Roof
The chances of being hit by a chunk of space rock are measured in the
billions-to-one. Roy Fausset, 59, had the closest of escapes last month
when what scientists now say was a meteorite crashed through his New
Orleans home.
I walked through my front door and it was like a mortar bomb had fallen on
my house.
Most space rocks burn up in the sky.
There was dust all over the floor of the entrance way and the two doors
leading to a utility room and the powder room had been blown open.
There was ceiling debris everywhere. I thought it must have been a broken
pipe, but there was no water.
As I was coming home, I'd noticed something on the roof, but had thought
nothing of it. It turned out there was a hole the size of a basketball
through the tiles.
Whatever it was, it had passed through the attic, then my daughter's
bedroom, through the powder room and into the crawl space under the floor.
I thought it must have been some frozen waste that had fallen from a
passenger airliner - they are carrying out improvements at our local
airport, so planes have been diverted over our house.
We really dodged the bullet. If anyone had been at home, they might have
been killed.
I called the police. An investigator went down into the crawl space and he
found some rock fragments. There are no rocks in New Orleans, it's all
silt. He said: 'It's a meteorite.'
I took a sample over to the nearby Tulane University, where Stephen Nelson
- the head of earth and environmental sciences department - examined it.
He said the rock was rhyolite - which is found in Mexico and Texas. He
thought it must have been thrown out of a plane by a vandal or become
attached to a plane somehow and then fallen off.
But now, after further analysis, it seems it has a profile consistent with
that of a meteorite. The police investigator was right.
I've collected up all the pieces. It's not a meteorite from Mars or Venus,
which sell for $1,500 a gram. It probably came from an asteroid, so is
only worth $3 - $10 a gram. It might help with the repairs.
I keep asking: Why me? Maybe God was telling me something?
But I don't care about the money. I'm just very grateful that no one was
injured. We really dodged the bullet. If anyone had been at home, they
might have been killed. I think just hearing the noise would have caused
me to expire.
One of my neighbors was out in her yard with her children eating
popsicles. They heard the impact and thought it was a car accident. If it
had fallen 100 feet away, they could all have died.
I've been very disorientated by the whole thing, especially when I
consider what a narrow escape we all had and what could have happened.
I keep asking: Why me? Maybe God was telling me something? I certainly
went to church on Sunday and I will never mock Him as I did in my foolish
youth.