Quake Rips Apart Japanese Road, Japanese Repair It in 6 Days

The disaster that struck Japan on March 11 will remain as a thorn in the collective memory of the Japanese people. Entire cities leveled, industries brought the a halt, scores of people killed and an effective infrastructure nearly brought to its knees.

The hardships that the Japanese have been used to deal with ever since the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (and probably way before that), combined with the Japanese way of living life, have made possible an engineering miracle less than a week after the earthquake ripped the Great Kanto Highway in Naka into pieces. A tiny miracle, compared to others achieved by the Japanese in these dire times, but one that is a testimony of how a natural disaster cannot break the human nature.

On March 17, repair work began on the highway that was at the time a series of craters linked together. It took the Japanese workers and engineers only six days to put the road back together and reopen it to traffic on March 23.

The two photos you see here picture the road right after the quake split it apart (first photo) and right before the reopening, after the road got repaired (photo 2).

Some might argue that the stretch of road damaged by the quake was not that long, hence the quick repair, but we know from experience that in other places on this Earth, a pothole significantly much smaller in size and less impressive in nature takes at times years to fix. And when it gets fixed, it's only temporary, as it resurfaces months later.