Tsunami in Samoa

(APIA, Samoa)

Stunned Samoans combed through the sodden wreckage of their lives and told of the terror of being trapped underwater or flung inland by a tsunami that ravaged towns and killed at least 150 people in the South Pacific.

Officials expect the death toll from Tuesday's disaster to rise as more areas are searched.

"The devastation caused was complete," Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele told New Zealand's National Radio on Wednesday after inspecting the southeast coast of the main island of Upolu, the most heavily hit area. "In some villages absolutely no house was standing. All that was achieved within 10 minutes by the very powerful tsunami."

His own village of Lesa was washed away, as were many others in Samoa and nearby American Samoa and Tonga.

A magnitude 8.0 quake struck off Samoa at 6:48 a.m. local time (1:48 p.m. EDT; 1748 GMT) Tuesday. The islands soon were engulfed by four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) high that reached up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland.

The GCP event was set for 8 hours beginning at 16:00 GMT, a little less than two hours before the quake, and ending at midnight. The result shows no strong or consistent deviation, and culminates with Chisquare 28828.048 on 28800 df, for p = 0.452 and Z = 0.119.

Tsunami in Samoa

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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