At least 529 people are now known to have died in a powerful
quake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra on
Wednesday, the government says.
Rescuers struggled on Thursday to find survivors in the
rubble of hundreds of collapsed buildings.
More than 400 people have been seriously injured, and the
death toll is expected to rise, officials say.
The 7.6-magnitude quake struck close to the city of Padang,
the capital of West Sumatra province.
The earthquake brought down hospitals, schools and shopping
malls, cut power lines and triggered landslides.
The social affairs ministry gave the latest confirmed death
toll of 529, but Rustam Pakaya, head of the health
ministry's disaster centre in Jakarta, said: "Our prediction
is that thousands have died."
A second quake of 6.8 struck close to Padang at 0852 local
time (0152 GMT) on Thursday but there were no immediate
reports of casualties or damage.
The first earthquake struck at 1716 local time (1016 GMT) on
Wednesday, some 85km (55 miles) under the sea, north-west of
Padang, the US Geological Survey said.
The GCP event was set for an 8 hour period beginning at
09:00 GMT to include somewhat more than an hour prior to the
main temblor. The result is Chisquare 29114.002 on 28800 df
for p = 0.096 and Z = 1.306. The graph shows a quite steady
deviation over the 7 hours beginning at the time of the
quake.
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.
