Fukushima, Tokyo:
A wall of water that slammed into Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant in the massive tsunami on March 11 was as high as 48 feet higher than normal sea levels, a brief video clip shot by a plant worker shows.
The video shows the giant wave generated by the March 11 earthquake crashing over the plant's seawall and engulfing the facility, with one sheet of spray rising higher than the buildings that house the plant's six reactors.
Tokyo Electric Power, the plant's owner, said the wall of water was likely 14 to 15 meters higher than normal sea levels, easily overwhelming the plant's 5-metre seawall.
The footage was shot from high ground about 900 metres south of the plant by a worker who evacuated before the tsunami hit,
CNN quoted the Tokyo Electric Power Company as saying in the six-second clip.
Photos released by the company showed shattered windows, scattered papers and dangling ceiling tiles throughout the plant's now-empty office annexe.
Two workers were killed in the basement of the Number 4 reactor's turbine plant when the tsunami struck, and their bodies were recovered only last week.
The tsunami knocked out generators and pumps needed to cool the plant's three operating reactors following the magnitude 9 earthquake, leaving engineers struggling to prevent a bigger disaster as those units radioactive cores overheated.
Workers have been pouring hundreds of tons of water a day into the reactors in an effort to keep them cool until normal circulation systems can be restored.
The Number 2 reactor is believed to be leaking highly radioactive water, some of which had been spilling into the Pacific until Wednesday, while flooded basements in the turbine plants of all three units are making it impossible to restore power, company officials said.