|
Nov 22 2010: Cambodia Bridge stampede:
Emergency workers in Cambodia are continuing their search
for bodies after the deaths of at least 378 people in a crush at
the Water Festival.
The country's prime minister has announced a day of mourning
on Thursday for the victims.
Charlotte Melville, travel writer from London gives an
eyewitness account.
I was on my way home with a friend at about 22:30, trying to
get through the
crowds stuck in gridlock around the Independence Monument.
A couple of ambulances were trying to get through the
crowds.
Three or four further ambulances came past heading south,
followed by
several police bikes going dangerously fast through the
crowds, that were
several hundred thousand-strong and presumably oblivious to
what was going
on.
The manageress at the hotel where I'm staying lost her
friend in the crush.
She said that a group of teenagers were fighting on the
bridge.
Apparently people panicked as the crowd pushed back away
from the fighting
boys on the north bridge and people were crushed.
The GCP event was set to begin at 22:00, a little before the
eyewitness says she became aware of serious problems, to
continue for 6 hours while news of the tragedy spread to the world.
The result is Chisquare 21203.491 on 21600 df, for p = 0.972 and
Z = -1.911. This result is opposite our prediction, but
is unusually strong and appears to reflect something of the
tragedy.
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.
|