[meteorite-list] Cali Colombia, fourth time's a charm!

From: Michael Farmer <meteoriteguy_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:38:13 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <69084.32873.qm_at_web33110.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Ok, I am in Miami on my way home from Cali Colombia
AGAIN! It seems I need a second home down there to be
more comfortable.
While in Spain I received an email with photos of a
Cali piece, a hammerstone which smashed through a
rooftop in the barrio of Ciudad Cordoba, the same
place where Cali #004 came down! It was only about one
block away from that house. The man came home that
evening and found some fragments of tile on the floor,
and noticed that the rooftop was cracked. He heard
about the meteorite fall a couple of days later, and
looked around the house and on the rooftop but found
no stone. Well, when I was there two weeks later, it
rained for the first time since the fall, and the
water came through the crack, so he went to replace
the rooftop and the while thing collapsed and broke
apart. While cleaning up the mess, he found a
meteorite, a complete stone weighing 66.5 grams. It
had damaged the rooftop, and rolled under the another
tile section it seems, remaining hidden. Unfortunately
for me, he did not really work hard to contact me, or
see one of the hundreds of fliers we had put up in the
area. Finally a week ago, he made an appoinment with
the Cali Astronomy Club to show them the piece, they
confirmed it and could not come close to buying it for
the price he wanted. They gave him my email, and the
rest is recent history, I came home from Spain, washed
my clothes, and barely 48 hours later, flew to
Colombia. I spent the day with the lucky family
yesterday, saw the site, and bought the stone with
more money that he makes in a year working as a school
teacher. The family was wonderful, and I took his
three kids several meteorites down, so they could
start their own collections. I have the oldest boy
(11yrs) trained to hunt meteorites, so maybe he will
produce!

This stone will be known as CALI #008, is a house
smasher (the 5th of the fall). The stone is beautiful,
photos up tomorrow, but is intact and hopefully will
stay that way. I got some pieces of the tile, but when
it shattered he threw most away and some was still up
on the roof, which I got.

So there are still less than 350 grams of Cali found,
and not much chance of other pieces. He has been
knocking on neighbor's doors for days trying to find
other pieces, with no luck.
Just another day in the life of a meteorite-hunter.
 
Michael Farmer
Received on Tue 25 Sep 2007 03:38:13 PM PDT