Porto Alegre, Brazil –
In all her 74 years, Lorena Martins had never seen anything so terrible: a deluge of filthy, rust-colored floodwaters that engulfed her modest home in Brazil, taking away everything but her family.
With the help of her son-in-law, Martins boarded a boat manned by firefighters who persuaded them to leave their home in a poor neighborhood of the city of Porto Alegre, which has been devastated by days of flooding.
The latest in a series of weather disasters to hit the South American giant has left dozens of people dead or missing and driven nearly 130,000 people from their homes in the capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.
