My mother pushed me inside and slammed the door, just as the wave struck our house. It felt like we'd been hit by a train.

　　The wave picked up the house, and we floated away. Seawater came up to my knees. I decided to change clothes, in case we had to swim. When I opened the closet, the back wall was gone! All I could see past my hanging clothes were waves and dead fish. It looked like a strange painting.

　　Through the windows we could see people floating by, holding onto whatever they could. A boy was clinging to a piece of lumber. The waves carried us far out into Hilo Bay and back again three times.

　　Finally our house slammed into a factory wall. Somehow my parents and I climbed into the factory, where we found some neighbors on the upper floor. We all got busy tearing burlap sugar bags into strips to make a rope. Whenever someone floated by, we threw them the rope.

Our family was fortunate. And I'm not nervous about tsunamis anymore. But when I got married, I told my husband, "We're not living at the beach. We're going to live in the mountains!"

S2: I downloaded an article from the Internet: How Schools Can Become More Disaster Resistant

T: Good! Please read it to us.

S2: During Hurricane Andrew, Florida schools were blown to pieces. During the Northridge Earthquake, California schools were damaged. And after the Red River flooded in the spring of 1997, North Dakota and Minnesota schools were inundated by mud and made uninhabitable. Federal, state and local governments have spent millions repairing or replacing schools after disasters. Further, students have been left anxious, uprooted, out of classrooms for long periods of time or relocated to other facilities -disrupting their education and increasing their stress. And no state, no location, no school district is invulnerable. As gloomy as this picture is, there is much that can be done by school officials to plan for disaster, to mitigate the risk, to protect the safety of students and