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UP to 2000 people were today feared to have been killed by a major
earthquake which triggered panic across the Indian Ocean region
devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Hundreds of people are thought to have died as their homes collapsed on
them following the quake which was centred off Indonesia's west coast.
Thousands of people in several countries fled to higher ground after
governments - including those of Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Japan and
Mauritius - issued tsunami warnings.
The quake, which measured 8.7 on the Richter scale, struck six miles
under the Indian Ocean, 125 miles off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia
at 11.09pm (5.09pm GMT) yesterday.
The town of Gunungsitoli on Nias, which lies off Sumatras western coast,
appears to have been the worst hit.
About 70 per cent of the houses and buildings in the town's market area
collapsed in the quake, local police chiefs said.
Erni Ginting, a spokeswoman for the disaster centre co-ordinating
official relief efforts in the region, said this morning: "We figure
that there are now around 1000 people dead on Nias."
But Indonesia's vice-president Jusuf Kalla said the final death toll may
be considerably higher.
"It is predicted - and its still a rough estimate - that the number of
the victims may be between 1000 and 2000," he said.
The GCP hypothesis test in this case follows the pattern for the
December 2004 quake and tsunami that wrought so much havoc, although,
fortunately there was no accpompanying tsunami in this case. The test
period was set from 16:00 to midnight UTC, which is an 8 hour period
beginning a little more than one hour before the main temblor, which
occurred at 11:09 pm local time (17:09 UTC). The analysis shows a fairly active
trace beginning at the time of the quake, with strong trends and
reversals. The terminal Z-score is 0.537, with p-value = 0.296.
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