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On February 18 2004 Iran suffered another tragic day, when a train
exploded, killing about 300 people, and injuring many more. At about
4:00 am, a train sitting on a siding, loaded with
chemicals, began rolling by itself. It had
no engine, and the speculation was that high winds pushed it into
motion. It rolled about 10 km to a village called Neyshabur, and then
derailed, setting some of the cars on fire. Officials and firemen were
on the scene working to put out the fire when it suddenly erupted in a
gigantic explosion, which broke windows miles away and registered over 3
on the seismic Richter scale. Most of the people in the vicinity were
killed, including the mayor and regional governor, as well as many
emergency and medical personnel. The explosion was at 09:37 local
(06:07 GMT).
The formal prediction was set for 4:00 am to 2:00 pm
local (00:30 to 10:30 GMT).
Chisquare was 36261 on 36000 df, with p = 0.165. The first figure shows
this formal analysis, with the graph covering the period from 4:00 am to
14:00, local time. Following it is an exploratory analysis that
plots the variance deviation during the same period of time. Both
figures have interesting, strong deviations in the early part of the
day, especially around 6:30 to 9:00, during the time the fire and
emergency personnel were focusing their efforts to control the fires.
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