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A fireball fell from the sky and slammed into southern Peru over the weekend, creating a huge crater that emitted a sickeningly smelly gas, local authorities said. More than 600 villagers fell ill, the Peruvian radio network RPP reported Tuesday.

Video reports from the scene, near the remote Andean village of Carancas along Peru’s border with Bolivia, showed what appeared to be a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide), 20-foot-deep (6-meter-deep) impact crater with a bubbling pool of water at the bottom.

Authorities said that the crater was made Saturday by a falling meteorite. Agence France Presse quoted a local official, Marco Limache, as saying that “boiling water started coming out of the crater, and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby.”

Limache told RPP that the gases emanating from the crater caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches and stomach pain — so much so that authorities were considering calling a state of emergency. The newspaper La Republica reported that seven policemen became ill and were taken to a hospital.

(full article

To be frank I don’t understand why authorities are considering declaring this an emergency, it clearly already is one. Honestly, the moment authorities first responded and began falling ill the officials should have stepped up and taken measures to protect their people. Something unknown falls from the sky and upon visiting the site people fall dangerously ill. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that, hey, that could because of what fell out of the sky, and hey, having people living near it right now without any knowledge of what is causing the problem is a very bad thing.

Common sense truly isn’t so common anymore.

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