Jodhpur: One hundred and forty-seven dead, over 60 injured
and hardly a drop of blood. All it took was some unruly
people jumping the queue and some furiously whispered rumours of a
bomb going off, to leave this deathly trail.
It was not even dawn. Over 10,000 had turned up at the
Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur's Mehrangarh Fort for a
darshan of the goddess. The temple gates had opened earlier
than usual on Tuesday morning, at 3.45 am.
Things went smoothly for about two hours. Then, suddenly,
some people began pushing forward. A barricade broke,
opening up more space on the 8-ft-widepath. Seeing the
widened approach, people began jumping the queue, and
suddenly everything started going wrong.
A few people fell down and were crushed under the feet of
rushing devotees. The news, as it trickled down, got
twisted. Someone mentioned a bomb, and all hell broke loose.
Panic-stricken people started running in the opposite
direction, pushing, trampling. A toll that may have been
contained to single digits kept shooting up with every push,
every desperate shove.
While the death toll from hospital sources and other
eyewitnesses totalled 147, authorities put it at 140.
Many suffocated to death while standing in the queue.
"Around 80% of the people died on the spot. We just
We just have three orthopaedic cases of the 45 persons
admitted at the hospital here," said Nitin Negi, a
doctor on duty at the city's Mahatma Gandhi Hospital.
The GCP event begins shortly before the stampede, at 5:30
local time and runs for 5 hours to include the developing
news and concern over the tragedy. The chisquare is 18292.6
on 18000 df, for a p-value of 0.062 and Z-score of 1.537.
The graph shows a ragged history of strong positive and
negative trends with an overall positive slope matching the
standard prediction.
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.
