Unlikely, but... what would you do?

Several years ago, I was driving home and glimpsed a daytime bolide. If you don't know what it is, it's a fireball in the sky -- a very bright meteor. Several other people saw it too -- it was reported on the evening news.

I was thinking back about that when I remembered that I had posted about the asteroid impact prediction -- the one over the Sudan where recently they were able to recover pieces of the impactor. I mentioned that in this post. (Here's another article about it, with pictures of what was found.)

So I was thinking about that today as I was driving. And I wondered: "What would I do if I suddenly saw a BIG fireball -- maybe even heard it, a sonic boom -- and knew that it was going to be big enough to hit and cause damage?"

Maybe not this much damage:

but sufficiently large enough to be noticed.

I imagine that I would probably slam on the brakes, pull to the side of the road, and first try to figure out where it was going (or if it had hit within a distance where I could see any effects). Then I'd turn on the radio to whatever news station might be saying something. Then I'd try to get home as fast as possible to get on the Internet to see if any reports were coming on, or special reports on TV, etc.

I guess the situation would be similar to the people who saw the 9/11 impacts, or who have been involved in a major earthquake. The difference here is that you wouldn't know for sure what had happened, at least not immediately. Maybe the asteroid just ended up like the one in Forest Park, Illinois -- broke some windows, punched through some ceilings, and ended up getting a couple of people at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum very excited.

Or maybe it was bigger. Living around here, maybe it ended up making a big steaming splash in the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, I regret that I don't have any readers, because I'd like to know -- what would YOU do if it happened?

Because they do happen -- all the time.