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7.2 Quake Hits Eastern Turkey

Yet another tragedy is unfolding in Turkey, where a 7.2 magnitude earthquake has destroyed much of Ercis, a town of 100,000, and severly damaged the larger city of Van. It is feared that many of the outlying small villages with mud-brick houses will have been largely destroyed. Here is some early description from the Globe and Mail.

Rescuers clawed through rubble on Monday to free people trapped by an earthquake that killed at least 270 people and wounded 1,000 in southeast Turkey. Hundreds more were feared dead.

Earthmoving machines and soldiers joined the frantic search through mounds of smashed concrete after Sunday’s 7.2 magnitude quake struck the city of Van and the town of Ercis, some 100 kilometres to the north, in Turkey’s Kurdish heartland.

7.2 Quake Hits Eastern Turkey

In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-storey apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew swiftly to Van to assess the scale of the disaster in a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) rebels. Turkish interior minister Idris Naim Sahin said the death toll has reached some 270, and that more than 1,000 others were injured.

The GCP event was set for 24 hours, as usual for large quakes with major destruction and loss of life. It begins at 10:00 GMT, about 41 minutes before the main temblor. The result is Chisquare 87130.481 on 86401 df, for p = 0.040 and Z = 1.752

7.2 Quake Hits Eastern Turkey

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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