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(APIA, Samoa)
Stunned Samoans combed through the sodden
wreckage of their lives and told of the terror of being
trapped underwater or flung inland by a tsunami that ravaged
towns and killed at least 150 people in the South Pacific.
Officials expect the death toll from Tuesday's disaster to
rise as more areas are searched.
"The devastation caused was complete," Samoan Prime Minister
Tuilaepa Sailele told New Zealand's National Radio on
Wednesday after inspecting the southeast coast of the main
island of Upolu, the most heavily hit area. "In some
villages absolutely no house was standing. All that was
achieved within 10 minutes by the very powerful tsunami."
His own village of Lesa was washed away, as were many others
in Samoa and nearby American Samoa and Tonga.
A magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa at 6:48 a.m. local
time (1:48 p.m. EDT; 1748 GMT) Tuesday. The islands soon
were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6
meters) high that reached up to a mile (1.5 kilometers)
inland.
The GCP event was set for 8 hours beginning at 16:00 GMT, a
little less than two hours before the quake, and ending at
midnight. The result shows no strong or consistent
deviation, and culminates with Chisquare 28828.048 on 28800
df, for p = 0.452 and Z = 0.119.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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