Meteorite Crashes Through New Zealand Roof

freitasm writes "The New Zealand Herald and Stuff are reporting on a 1.3kg, four billion-year-old rock that fell through the roof of a house in suburban Auckland, New Zealand. Their insurance company will pay for the hole in the roof and couch and two holes in the ceiling. The meteorite itself, a chunk of an asteroid, could have been basketball-sized when it impacted Earth's atmosphere at 15km a second. By the time it hit the house, its velocity had probably slowed to 100-200m a second."

Comments

Re:Could be a good thing?

[Tranzig]

The estimated value is over 10000 NZD, that's about 6000 USD or 5000 EUR. It's in the article.

Re:Insurance?

[mat catastrophe]

You would be surprised what is and is not covered under some insurance policies.

Besides, Acts of God can also sometimes be covered under insurance - after all, what's the point of wasting all that damn money on insurance if they can just turn on you and say, "Nope, that tree falling on your house last night during the freak ice storm was an Act of God" ?

So, for those too lazy to click the link above, meteors are covered the same as airplanes under home insurance, "objects falling from the sky." Now, the reason this is covered is precisely because it doesn't happen very often. Just as people on the coast pay extra for hurricane damage insurance and folks in the midwest pay extra for tornado insurance, if there were an area where meteors were common, there'd be extra clauses for meteor damage.

Insurance is, largely, a racket.

Re:why claim the insurance?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

As another reader pointed out, the odds of it being hit by a second meteorite, is exactly the same is it being hit by the first... which is slim, but another meteor isn't going to avoid the house next time because a meteor crashed there beforehand.

Re:lots of meteorite activity lately?

[kidgenius]

It's not the act of flushing that causes those to come out. There is a valve on the plane that allows for a hose to be hooked up to the plane to remove all of that "matter". Well, when one of these 2 valves goes bad, the stuff starts to leak out of the hatch on the plane. As it sits on the outside of the plane, it freezes, then will break free. I heard that one time there was a piece a little smaller than a basketball that broke free, and the engine ingested it. Needless to say, the plane was forced to land b/c the engine was severly damaged.

Also, let me say that you do not want to be the guy hooking up the hose when one of those valves is bad. You end up having to reach your arm up the hatch of the plane, and manually open the valve, and hope to god you can get yourself out of the way, and the hose in place before the "matter" starts flowing. As you can imagine, it is a pretty difficult thing to do.

Re:why claim the insurance?

[rollingcalf]

The probability of both hitting, given that A already hit, is just the probablity that B will hit.

Other posters were implicitly referring to the fact that the first one already hit, while your statement is referring to a time when none has hit yet.