In all her 74 years, Lorena Martins had never seen anything so horrible: a torrent of foul, rust-colored flood water engulfing her modest home in Brazil, taking away everything but her family.
With help from her son-in-law, Martins steps into a boat manned by firefighters who managed to persuade them to abandon their home in a poor district of the city of Porto Alegre, which has been devastated by days of flooding.
The latest in a string of weather catastrophes to hit the South American giant has left dozens of people dead or missing and forced nearly 130,000 from their homes in the capital of the southern Rio Grande do Sul state.