The earlier and more unusual fall took place on June 30, 1908, at about 8:00 a.m., approximately 40 miles northwest of the trading post of Vanovara. A fireball exceeding the sun in brilliance flashed across the sky and was followed by extremely violent airwaves and earth-tremors. The pressure wave in the atmosphere set up by this meteorite fall was strong enough to damage roofs and doors of houses near the point of impact, as for example, in the village of Vanovara. On both rivers and lakes in the area of fall, the pressure wave in the air piled up high, sharp-fronted water waves that resembled the bores on the Seine and Severn and that upset fishing craft and swamped other small boats. Throughout a wide region at somewhat greater distances from the impact point, tidal-like bores were raised on rivers and lakes. So gigantic was the atmospheric disturbance, that it was detected at almost every station in the world where sufficiently sensitive barometers were in operation. Eyewitnesses of this meteorite fall said that at the time the fireball passed near them, they felt almost unbearable heat. A huge “fiery pillar” rose above the point of impact, which by good fortune was in a desolate and almost uninhabited swampy basin between the Chunya and the Podkamennaya (i.e., “Stony”) Tunguska rivers. The meteorite fall takes its name from the latter stream. The central portion of the region of impact is marked not only by a number of craters in the swampy terrain, but also by mute evidence of the extraordinary destructive power of the Podkamennaya Tunguska meteorite. Over an area of many square miles, the explosion blew down the standing forest so that the tops of the overthrown trees (estimated by the Russians to number more than 80,000,000!) all point away from the impact center. The intense heat charred the trunks and branches of the trees in this area in much the same way as the heat from the first of all atomic bomb explosions scorched the desert shrubs around the test site in south-central New Mexico. Within the area of fall, countless reindeer belonging to the native Tunguse herdsmen were killed, only their charred carcasses remaining. How great the heat released at impact was may be judged by the well-established fact that the prized silver samovars of the nomads were found melted amid the debris of their flattened camps. In at least one instance, a Tunguse was so overcome by the terrible event he had witnessed that he was “sick for a long time.” The whole impact-region came to be considered as accursed by the natives, who abandoned the use of all trails crossing it.