Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): And to a very different kind of science story: how researchers in Japan are trying to limit the most catastrophic damage from a tsunami.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien files the last of three reports from Japan.
MILES O'BRIEN: Yoshiko Kiuchi (ph) remembers March 11, 2011, as if it were yesterday.
"We got a warning that tsunami would come in two minutes," she told me. "So, we escaped by car in a rush, literally with little more than the clothes on our back."
Her home and her neighborhood in the coastal town of Arahama are gone, pressure-washed by the epic tsunami. She lives in temporary housing now, but comes back here regularly to gather what she can out of what remains of her garden.
"I will take these flowers to my temporary house," she said. "I will plant them in the planter there."
Nearby, there is plenty of evidence the Japanese are working hard to clean up and rebuild. But how? The tsunami, not the earthquake, is linked to nearly all the 20,000 deaths here. And building coastal towns that can repel giant waves is not easy or cheap.
That is what they are working on here at the Port and Airport Research Institute about fifty miles south of Tokyo. It was open house day when we were here, a chance for people to see and feel how powerful even a scaled-down version of a tsunami can be. But it is not just for show.
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