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One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded on the East
Coast shook buildings and rattled nerves from South Carolina
to New England on Tuesday and forced the evacuations of
parts of the Capitol, White House and Pentagon.
In Washington, the National Cathedral said cracks had
appeared in the flying buttresses around the apse at one
end. "Everyone here is safe," the Cathedral said on
its official Twitter feed. "Please pray for the
Cathedral as there has been some damage."
Shaking was felt as far south as Charleston, S.C., and as
far north and east as Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where Mr.
Obama is taking summer vacation and was starting a round of
golf when the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. EDT.
The 5.8-magnitude quake shook central Virginia and the East
Coast. One of the most powerful earthquakes in Virginia history
rippled from its epicenter in Louisa County throughout the
eastern United States but injured few people and caused
little major structural damage.
The 15-second tremor measured 5.8 on the Richter scale
Tuesday at 1:51 p.m., prompting buildings to empty,
cellphone service to go silent and two nuclear reactors near
the center of the quake to shut down without
damage.
The GCP event was set for 6 hours beginning at 1:00, with
the main temblor 51 minutes later. This is a relatively
short time period compared with our usual quake time (in
recent years, we usually look at 24 hours) because there was
little damage and few deaths or injuries. The event is
chosen mainly because of the location near Washington DC,
and because it was felt over such a large area.
The result is Chisquare 21932.271
on 21600, for p = 0.055 and Z = 1.594
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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