Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: Torrential rain caused floods and triggered landslides in western Japan last week, bringing death and destruction to neighborhoods built decades ago near steep mountain slopes. At least 176 people were killed, the government said, with dozens missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster since 1982. In Kumano, a mountainside community in Hiroshima prefecture that was hit by a landslide last week, Ken Kirioka anxiously watched rescuers toiling through mud, sand and smashed houses to find the missing, including his 76-year-old father, Katsuharu. “He is old and has a heart condition. I prepared myself for the worst when I heard about the landslide on Friday night,” he said, pointing at a pile of mud and rubble where he said his father was buried. “He is an old-fashioned father who is hard-headed and does not talk much,” Kirioka said, adding he would stay until his father was found. “It would be too bad for him if a family member were not around”. Rescuers working under a scorching sun combed through heaps of wood and thickly caked mud in a search for bodies, helped by sniffer dogs. In some cases only the foundation of homes remained as they cut through debris with chain saws. With temperatures of 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher in the devastated areas in Okayama and Hiroshima prefectures, attention turned to preventing heat-stroke among rescue workers and in evacuation centers where thousands of people have sought shelter. People sat on thin mats on a gymnasium floor in one center, plastic bags of belongings piled around them and bedding folded off to the side. Portable fans turned slowly as children cried. Abe, who canceled an overseas trip to deal with the disaster, was criticized after a photograph posted on Twitter showed Abe and his defense minister at a party with lawmakers just as the rains intensified. After observing the damage from a helicopter flying over Okayama, one of the hardest-hit areas, Abe visited a crowded evacuation center. He crouched down on the floor to speak with people, many of them elderly, and asked about their health. He clasped one man’s hands as they spoke. Later he told reporters the government would do everything it could to help the survivors. “We’ll cut through all the bureaucracy to secure the goods people need for their lives, to improve life in the evacuation centers - such as air conditioners as the hot days continue - and then secure temporary housing and the other things people need to rebuild their lives,” he said. Abe is up for re-election as party leader in September and has seen his popularity ratings edge back up after taking a hit over a cronyism scandal earlier this year. His government pledged an initial $4 billion toward recovery on Tuesday, and a later special budget if needed. Officials turned to social media to warn of the additional danger of food-borne illnesses, urging people to wash their hands and take other measures against food poisoning. Evacuation orders were issued for 25 households in the city of Fukuyama after cracks were found in a reservoir. Water accumulating behind piles of debris blocking rivers also posed a danger after a swollen river rushed into a Fukuyama residential area on Monday, prompting more evacuation orders. The intensifying heat was expected to trigger thunderstorms on Wednesday, with authorities warning new landslides could be set off on mountainsides saturated with water. Japanese media on Wednesday focused on the timing of evacuation orders issued in the hard-hit Mabi district of Kurashiki city just minutes before a levee broke and water poured into the residential area. A number of the dead in Mabi were found in their homes, suggesting they did not have enough time to flee, media reports said. Claim: Japan PM visits flood disaster zone, promises help as new warnings issued.

Output: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited flood-stricken parts of Japan on Wednesday as the death toll from the worst weather disaster in 36 years reached 176 and health concerns rose amid scorching heat and the threat of new floods.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: No company wants to be the next LM Wind Power. “All it takes is to see something like that happen in a neighboring business or a business similar to yours and everyone gets a lot more fastidious with control measures,” said Dr. Paul Carson, a public health and infectious disease specialist at North Dakota State University, referring to the spread at the Grand Forks plant. Officials with two of the state’s largest plants, window and door maker Marvin and agriculture and construction components producer John Deere Electronic Solutions, say there are new rules of the road. And they’re doing more than the standard protocol of proper hygiene, high-tech protective gear, social distancing and stickers that say, “IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE TOO CLOSE.” Hallways, entrances, and exits are strictly one-way. Other changes have included temperature checks, unique equipment like “no touch” door openers, liberal leave policies and pay provisions, and an added emphasis on communication between management and workers. ’“The stakes are too high right now,” said Paul Marvin, CEO of Marvin, a century-old Warroad, Minnesota-based company with 6,000 employees in eight states, including 1,300 in the Fargo area. “We want to make people feel comfortable and build trust. It costs you a little money in the short term but it pays dividends in the long run.” The John Deere Electronic Solutions plant in Fargo employs about 750 people. A company spokeswoman said “one of the most impactful steps” they’ve taken is to assure employees that they will be paid if they have symptoms of the virus, don’t feel well or believe they could have been exposed. Marvin employees receive paid leave if they are sick and unpaid leave with health benefits if they just don’t feel comfortable going to work. Paul Marvin said employees don’t have to “prove how sick they are” with notes from their doctors. And their jobs will be waiting for them when they return. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has held up a Canada-based potato processing business as the gold standard for protecting employees from the coronavirus, stating that Cavendish Farms plants in North Dakota and elsewhere have not recorded a single COVID-19 case among thousands of workers. The company employs 250 people at its Jamestown plant. “It has been a family owned-business for decades, taking care of their people,” Burgum said. “They have a culture of safety that has been long established. It’s easy for them to take it up another level.” Cavendish Farms spokeswoman Mary Keith said the numerous safeguards include infrared cameras to monitor the temperatures of people entering buildings and hundreds of signs in multiple languages placed throughout the plants to make employees aware of social distancing and other guidelines. The company purchased 2,700 plexiglass face shields for all of its operations and has added floor-to-ceiling barriers made of plexiglass or wood, she said. “We feel that what we did very well is we reacted early and we reacted fast to the risk and escalated our measures,” Keith said, adding that workers awaiting testing or treatment for COVID-19 receive 10 paid days with health benefits. Meanwhile, the number of infected workers at LM Wind Power stands at about 150 at the Grand Forks plant that employs about 900 people. State and local health officials are undertaking a vigorous contact tracing effort, recruiting dozens of people to help find other COVID-19 cases related to the plant. Some LM employees have complained publicly about what they believed to be a lack of safety precautions, which the company has denied. Officials with the Department of Labor and Human Rights have not received any complaints from LM employees, according to Burgum spokesman Mike Nowatzki. Scott Weislow, Marvin’s director of enterprise risk management, said Marvin had a pandemic blueprint in its library after dealing with the Avian flu and that gave them a head start, he said. “I think we’re going to see an evolution in business; not just us but everybody,” Weislow said. “Working from home will be more acceptable. Some of these social distancing measures are probably going to stick around and you’re going to see other measures like voice activated lights and voice activated door openers.” Carson said when it comes to the coronavirus, even the most stringent measures may not be enough to dodge “the luck of the draw.” It only takes one infected person who’s not showing symptoms to start the spread, he said. Claim: Grand Forks outbreak has other North Dakota plants on alert.

Output: A widespread outbreak of the coronavirus that has shuttered a wind turbine plant in northeastern North Dakota and initiated a massive contact tracing effort has led many of the state’s largest manufacturers to review and relay their safety measures.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: This summer, she’ll test her rowing talent in a far more challenging environment, where small crews of rowers rarely go: the Pacific Ocean. Dawson is taking part in a 2,400-mile rowing race from Monterey, California, to Honolulu. She and three teammates are aiming to break a world record — 50 days, 8 hours, 14 minutes, set in 2014 — for a women’s rowing team. Dawson and her three teammates will begin rowing across the Pacific Ocean on June 2. She plans to post updates on her personal blog, http://row4climate.com/ and on her team’s blog, http://www.rippleeffectrowing.com/ But they also want to put a spotlight on the far-reaching impacts of humankind on the Earth by rowing across parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a vast gyre of pulverized plastic garbage occupying an area roughly four times the size of California. Dawson, who studied atmospheric sciences at the UW and will begin working on her doctorate at Stanford University this fall, plans to send photos and videos of the garbage patch. She hopes to record the journey on her blog and the team’s blog as she goes. “It’s going to be a hard, demanding journey — and that’s what it’s going to take to combat climate change,” said Dawson, 22, who was a member of the UW crew in 2016 and 2017. The four women will alternate two hours of rowing with two hours of sleep, 24 hours a day, for 40 to 50 days. They’ll be rowing a specially designed oceangoing rowboat they’ve named the Ripple Effect. Their journey is part of the third Great Pacific Race, organized by New Ocean Wave, a British company. It involves eight teams of rowers crossing the Pacific. They are the only all-women team in the race. Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW and one of Dawson’s former professors, described Dawson as “the type of person who tries to do things that seem impossible. “I hope it raises awareness about the types of changes we’re making to the environment,” he said “The oceans are different from when she was born (in 1996). They are a lot hotter, a lot more acidic. And, there’s a lot more plastic.” One day last week, Dawson and her coach, Conal Groom of the Seattle Rowing Center, carried a one-person shell out onto the water east of the Ballard Bridge. Dawson sat on the impossibly small seat and rowed the sleek shell past a line of brawny, battered commercial-fishing boats with names like Determined, Aleutian Challenger, Sea Venture and Botany Bay. Skimming along under a cloudy sky, she scattered a flock of ducks and passed a partly submerged plastic bag floating in the water. In an oceangoing race, “technique is useless,” said Groom, who rowed in the 2000 Summer Olympics. “It’s basically fitness. My job is to make sure she has enough training.” Dawson typically rows up to two hours a day in the morning. In the afternoon, she works out for another two hours, doing a range of fitness activities including cycling and weightlifting. When she’s not training, she’s working to raise $20,000 to help fund the journey. The race will hinge on things that are beyond her team’s control — weather, currents, waves. “And luck,” Groom said. Dawson has only met one of her teammates in person. Two are from Great Britain, and one is from Brazil. They connected over the internet. They’re coordinating the trip via daily Skype calls. They’ll meet in Monterey next month, for the final leg of training. The race begins June 2. “It’s going to be a crazy experience,” she said. Dawson has displayed a seriousness of purpose and fascination with the natural world that impressed adults when she was just a kid, growing up in Port Townsend. When she was 10 years old, she and her sister, Chloe, began volunteering at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, where the girls met Libby Palmer, its co-founder. Palmer was struck by Dawson’s maturity, and her ability to do sustained, concentrated work and to absorb information like a sponge. In 2008, the science center started a four-year project to clean and reassemble the skeleton of an orca whale that had washed up on Dungeness Spit in 2001. Eliza and Chloe volunteered for four years, meticulously cleaning the bones and helping to assemble and position the 24-foot-long skeleton for display. Finding a fully intact orca carcass on a beach is rare — the mammals usually sink in open water when they die. Research revealed that the dead orca was heavily contaminated with toxins. “That was a wake-up call for me,” said Dawson. She’d grown up sailing and rowing in what seemed like the pristine waters around Port Townsend. How could a whale living in those same waters be full of toxins? The orca project sparked a growing interest in how the ocean was being changed by acidification and carbon dioxide. Those interests combined with her love of math and physics. “Climate change is a fact, not a belief,” she said. “It is mathematical equations. It is physics . it is clear the climate is changing, and it will affect everyone.” Frierson, the UW professor, met Dawson when she visited his lab as a high-school student and invited her to join his lab to do research as a freshman. “She has the determination, the intelligence that you don’t see in many students,” he said. He hopes students and faculty in atmospheric sciences will be able to aid Dawson’s journey — giving the team a heads-up about upcoming weather and other details like projections of wave heights. “Even just things like forecasting cloudiness might help her to know how long she can use her electric devices,” which are solar-powered, he said. “I’m hoping we can be useful to her, and get some good experience forecasting a place that’s not forecast that much.” Dawson is also working with EarthGames, a group of researchers, game developers and students who develop video and board games about the natural world, and who plan to release a game about Dawson’s journey shortly before it begins. This fall, she will start a doctorate program at Stanford University, where she plans to study why the Antarctic ice sheets are collapsing and what effect the retreating ice could have on sea-level rise. Dawson is confident in the boat, which has two very small cabins for resting and sleeping, and two seats for the rowers. An emergency vessel will be in the area, and a helicopter could airlift a rower to safety if the worst happened. “They’re going to have the latest technology — she’s such a whiz at everything technological,” Palmer said. “There’s nothing macho about their approach. They’re working with a lot of expert people who are lending her a hand.” The boat will contain all the food needed for the trip, most of it dehydrated, and is equipped with a desalinator to make potable water out of seawater, along with a GPS tracking device and a satellite phone. “I have a lot of trust in her, in knowing what her limits are,” Frierson said. “I just know this, from the academic side, that she’s not a person who tries to pretend she can do things she can’t.” ___ Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com Claim: Woman to row across ocean for environmental awareness.


Output: As a member of the University of Washington’s elite women’s varsity crew, Eliza Dawson honed her athletic skills on the sometimes-choppy waters of Lake Washington.