After the generators were swamped by the tsunami, back up battery kicked in. That lasted for 8 hours by design. Disaster planning/design assumed power resumption by the time that 8 hours was up. Tsunami was in fact taken into account but not this size of tsunami which is a very rare event (similar to the size of earthquake).
With the amount of destruction they simply could not restore power within that short amount of time.
From what I've heard the pumps should be fine and operational once they get power restored. For the most part the buildings exploded in the way they were designed to explode....blowing the walls out and roof off so that equipment is protected. It really is amazing how they can design buildings for explosions. There was a chemical plant I visited once that literally had a house 15 feet from the side wall of the reactor building (housing several 5000 gallon reactors). That building blew up at a later date when a reaction went out of control and beyond a couple of broken windows there was no harm to the house.
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