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Look closer at optical illusions, says Melissa Hogenboom, and they can reveal how you truly perceive reality.

Visual, or optical, illusions show us that our minds tend to make assumptions about the world - and what you think you see is often not the truth.

Throughout history, curious minds have questioned why our eyes are so easily fooled by these simple drawings. Illusions, we have found, can reveal everything from how we process time and space to our experience of consciousness.

Scroll down our interactive guide to find out why.

Illusions have a long history, going as far back as the ancient Greeks.

In 350BC, Aristotle noted that "our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled".

He noticed that if you watch a waterfall and shift your gaze to static rocks, the rocks appear to move in the opposite direction of the flow of water, an effect we now call "motion aftereffect" or the waterfall illusion.

Tracking the flow of the water seems to "wear out" certain neurons in the brain as they adapt to the motion. When you then shift your gaze to the rocks, other competing neurons over-compensate, causing the illusion of movement in the other direction.

In the 1960-70s illusions inspired a style called optical art, or "Op-Art". Victor Vasarely is widely regarded as the father of this movement, and some of his work is studied by scientists today. For example, research using his "nested squares illusion", similar to the image below, suggests that the brain identifies shapes using corners rather than lines.

Today, illusion research is booming once more. Technology advances now allow scientists to peer inside our brains as we look at illusions, and to begin to understand the underlying mechanisms going on inside our head.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to analyse how the neurons in our brain respond to individual illusions.

Martinez-Conde is now building on the work of some of the 19th Century researchers. It was Helmholtz, for example, who first realised that our eyes make rapid movements called saccades.

To experience them, gently put a finger on your eye lid and move your eye. You will see that the world will start to appear jittery, like a series of snapshots. We don't notice our eye darting about like this because our brain smoothes things out when constructing what we see.

Martinez-Conde realised that these saccades might help to explain why we see movement in this image, the snake illusion.

All of this research points to one thing: our visual system remains too limited to tackle all of the information our eyes take in. "For that our brain would need to be bigger than a building, and still then it wouldn't be enough," says Martinez-Conde.

And so our minds take shortcuts. Like betting for the best horse in a race, our brain constantly chooses the most likely interpretation of what we see.

Seeing, then, is certainly not always believing.

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Look closer at optical illusions, says Melissa Hogenboom, and they can reveal how you truly perceive reality. Visual, or optical, illusions show us that our minds tend to make assumptions about the world - and what you think you see is often not the truth.

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Climate change will bring more frequent and fierce rainstorms to cities like Houston. But unchecked development remains a priority in the famously un-zoned city, creating short-term economic gains for some while increasing flood risks for everyone.

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It was 2 a.m. on April 18. Over the next several hours, her two granddaughters - ages 12 and 15 - perched on tables, scared to put their feet in the dark gray floodwater rising below them. It nearly topped 3 feet.

"They couldn't get in the beds because the beds were wet. They couldn't go to the bathroom because the water was over the toilet bowl," Hammond recalled.

"We were in there, well, trapped."

The storm that pummeled Hammond's modest brick home - nicknamed the "Tax Day" flood because it fell on the deadline to file federal income taxes - came just 11 months after another, on Memorial Day 2015, that also crippled the city. Together, the floods killed 16 people, inflicted well over $1 billion in damage and provoked an unprecedented uproar from Houstonians, some of whom are now suing the city over chronic flooding problems. A month after the Tax Day flood, another mega-storm hit the city, dumping well over a foot of rain on parts of Harris County, home to Houston, in 24 hours.

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The area's history is punctuated by such major back-to-back storms, but many residents say they are becoming more frequent and severe, and scientists agree.

"More people die here than anywhere else from floods," said Sam Brody, a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher who specializes in natural hazards mitigation. "More property per capita is lost here. And the problem's getting worse."

Why?

Scientists, other experts and federal officials say Houston's explosive growth is largely to blame. As millions have flocked to the metropolitan area in recent decades, local officials have largely snubbed stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater. That has led to an excess of floodwater during storms that chokes the city's vast bayou network, drainage systems and two huge federally owned reservoirs, endangering many nearby homes - including Virginia Hammond's.

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On top of that, scientists say climate change is causing torrential rainfall to happen more often, meaning storms that used to be considered "once-in-a-lifetime" events are happening with greater frequency. Rare storms that have only a miniscule chance of occurring in any given year have repeatedly battered the city in the past 15 years. And a significant portion of buildings that flooded in the same time frame were not located in the "100-year" floodplain - the area considered to have a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year - catching residents who are not required to carry flood insurance off guard.

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Scientists say the Harris County Flood Control District, which manages thousands of miles of floodwater-evacuating bayous and helps enforce development rules, should focus more on preserving green space and managing growth. The City of Houston, too. And they say everyone should plan for more torrential rainfall because of the changing climate. (A host of cities in the U.S. and around the world are doing so.)

But county and city officials responsible for addressing flooding largely reject these arguments. Houston's two top flood control officials say their biggest challenge is not managing rapid growth but retrofitting outdated infrastructure. Current standards that govern how and where developers and residents can build are mostly sufficient, they say. And all the recent monster storms are freak occurrences - not harbingers of global warming or a sign of things to come.

The longtime head of the flood control district flat-out disagrees with scientific evidence that shows development is making flooding worse. Engineering projects can reverse the effects of land development and are doing so, Mike Talbott said in an interview with The Texas Tribune and ProPublica in late August before his retirement after 18 years heading the powerful agency. (His successor shares his views.)

The claim that "these magic sponges out in the prairie would have absorbed all that water is absurd," Talbott said.

He also said the flood control district has no plans to study climate change or its impacts on Harris County, the third-most-populous county in the United States.

Of the astonishing frequency of huge floods the city has been getting, he said, "I don't think it's the new normal." He also criticized scientists and conservationists for being "anti-development."

"They have an agenda ... their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense," he said.

But Talbott acknowledged that projects in the works wouldn't come close to protecting against something like a Tax Day flood. Those include retrofitting old drainage, widening bayous and building more ponds to temporarily store floodwater.

Meanwhile, the city of Houston's "flood czar," appointed after the Tax Day storm to assess the city's flooding problems, appears more receptive to alternative solutions, like more green space. But Stephen Costello, an engineer and former city councilman and mayoral candidate, has had no budget, staff or firm timeline. (He expects to hire one paid staffer in the coming weeks.)

He also acknowledges his role as more political than action-oriented. He spends much of his time consoling angry residents at community meetings and "making house calls." And he is pursuing smaller, cheaper, quick-hit projects.

"I think what people are keenly interested in is making sure that there is a point person that they can direct their comments to," said Houston's Mayor, Sylvester Turner, noting the city "has never had a chief resilience officer. That indicates in and of itself a major commitment."

But residents who have flooded say they're looking for more than that.

Eight months after the Tax Day flood, Hammond's home is still in shambles, with almost no furniture, kitchen cabinets or place to cook. She wants someone to buy her out, but she's not optimistic.

"I'm too old to go through this again," Hammond said. "It's very traumatizing."
The New Normal?
For Louise Hansen, the story has been the same every time she's flooded: The water starts to creep into her house in the middle of the night.

In 2009 - the first time her west Houston home flooded after she moved into it about a decade earlier - she figured it was an anomaly. Then it happened again in 2015. And again in 2016.

Three times in less than 10 years - for a home that's not in any floodplain identified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It's actually paralyzed me," said Hansen, who grew up in the area and is now selling her house just for the lot value. "I just don't think I can go through another flood."

Many of Hansen's neighbors, who live in an area of Houston known as Memorial City, have had the same experience. They've flooded in 2009, 2015 and 2016, and none of them live in any known floodplain. So they have formed a group called "Residents Against Flooding," and recently, the group sued the City of Houston and a local tax reinvestment zone this year, demanding better drainage.

What's happened in Memorial City is called "urban flooding." The phenomenon refers to flooding outside of any known floodplain - in this case, outside the 100-year floodplain, which triggers insurance requirements, or the 500-year floodplain, which has a 1 in 500 chance of flooding in any given year. Homeowners don't need insurance to get a mortgage in the 500-year floodplain, but many buy it anyway.

And it turns out that Houston has seen the most urban flooding of any other area in the country in the past four decades, according to recent analysis by Brody, the Texas A&M scientist.

Scientists say there are a number of likely culprits. Maps showing where the floodplains are may be outdated, for one thing, and the drainage in this older part of town was likely built before engineers understood the true risk of flooding in the area.

Then there are the reasons scientists fear local officials are ignoring.

For one, flood planning is still done by looking at what's happened in the past. But climate change means that might not work anymore.

"How do we determine where the 100-year flood zone lies? By looking backwards at rain events in the past," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. "Looking backwards does not work so well if climate is changing."

In general, Hayhoe said, climate change takes the risks that people already face and makes them worse. That's particularly true for Houston because it sits so close to the Gulf of Mexico, where waters have been warming as the planet gets hotter.

Warm water means more evaporation and more water vapor in the air. So when a storm comes along, there's more water to pick up and dump on nearby land.

"The exact same storm that comes along today has more rain associated with it than it would have 50 or 100 years ago," Hayhoe said. "And that's a big part of what happened in Houston" on Tax Day.

There are many ways to measure the frequency of rare storms in an area. The Harris County Flood Control District does so by tracking rainfall totals for the entire county within a 24-hour period. Based on that data, which dates back to 1989, the county has been hit with eight rare storms.

Five of those storms are considered to have a 1 in 100 chance of occurring each year, including the rains that hit in May of this year. Another three are considered to be even rarer, including the Tax Day storm in April of this year.

The flood control district could not provide data in time for this story on rainfall that occurred over a 12-hour period, rather than a 24-hour period. But it nevertheless confirmed that the number of rare storms would be higher. (Enough rain fell during the Memorial Day 2015 storm over 12 hours to classify it as a 100-year event.)

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But Talbott doesn't think Houston's most recent back-to-back torrential floods are indicative of climate change, or that studying its potential impacts should be a priority for the Harris County Flood Control District.

"We've had heavy back-to-back rainfalls before," he said.

Of the low probability that two 100-year storms hit within weeks of each other, he said, "You can flip a coin and come up heads 10 times in a row." (The flood control district is partially funding a study that will help decide whether rainfall totals should change for what are considered to be rare storms.)

He also downplayed the human impact of the Tax Day storm, pointing out that no one drowned in their home - only in flooded underpasses they drove into - and that the resulting flood impacted a relatively small portion of the population.

"As bad as the April, the Tax Day flood, was this year, if you look at the number of people affected in Harris County, it's less than 1 percent of the population. Is the other 99 percent willing to pay for a much more robust system?" he said.

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Scientists also worry that local officials are ignoring another crucial reason Houston is flooding more: what Hayhoe calls "the paving of Houston."

The region was once home to acres of prairie grass whose roots extended far underground, with a capacity to absorb water for days on end or even permanently. Most of that land has now been paved over. The Katy Prairie northwest of Houston was once about 600,000 acres of flood-absorbing land; recent development has reduced it to a quarter of that capacity, according to estimates from the Katy Prairie Conservancy, an advocacy group.

That means the rain is now falling on what are called impervious or impermeable surfaces, like concrete, preventing the ground underneath from absorbing it. So the rainfall becomes "runoff," traveling to wherever is easiest for it to flow. The water might flow to a nearby stream, but on its way the water could flood homes, cars and businesses, or the stream might be overwhelmed by that water, causing more flooding nearby.

In Harris County alone, research by Texas A&M scientist John Jacob shows, almost 30 percent of freshwater wetlands were lost between 1992 and 2010, a figure he calls "unconscionable."

As wetlands have been lost, the amount of impervious surface in Harris County increased by 25 percent from 1996 to 2011, Brody said. And there's no way that engineering projects or flood control regulations have made up for that change, he said.

Between 2001 and 2005, his research found, the loss of flood-absorbing land along the Gulf of Mexico increased property damage from floods by about $6 million - much of that outside floodplains.

"There's no doubt that the development ... that we're putting in these flood-prone areas is exacerbating flooding over time," Brody said. "There's a huge body of research out there beyond Houston, across the world" supporting that argument.

Research by Talbott's own Harris County Flood Control District points to the effectiveness of prairie grass to absorb floodwater. "The restoration of one acre of prairie," a 2015 report by the district wrote, would offset the extra volume of runoff created by two acres of single-family homes or one acre of commercial property. (The district says that data is preliminary.)

But Talbott and his successor, Russ Poppe, don't buy the research.

Developers have to follow regulations that should reverse the effects of paving over wetlands, they both argued. That includes building what are called detention ponds, which can temporarily store rainwater when it falls on pavement and isn't absorbed into the ground.

These regulations first went into effect in the mid-1980s. Talbott and Poppe claim that all development since then has not contributed to any additional flooding.

Both insisted the rules are so effective that an acre of commercial strip mall would discharge stormwater at the same rate as an acre covered in prairie grass - though not for events rarer than a 100-year storm. They pointed to a 2011 study commissioned by the flood control district as evidence.

But scientists vehemently disagree with those claims. They say the restrictions are inadequate - and loosely enforced - and could worsen the situation for people like Louise Hansen and her neighbors.

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When developments in floodplains are elevated, they can end up redirecting floodwaters to a nearby neighborhood, causing flooding where it otherwise might not have happened, in areas far outside floodplains. The phenomenon has been acknowledged by FEMA, but it's never been fully studied.

Brody said he couldn't be sure that's what's happening to Hansen, but a graduate student of his, Kayode Atoba, is researching that very question right now. And Hansen's story is a familiar one.

"I can't tell you how many times I've gotten people calling me saying: 'I've never flooded before, I've been here for 30 years, I'm not in a floodplain," Brody said. "And every single time, there's a development nearby that's changed drainage ... that story is told every day tens of thousands of times across the country."

Talbott disagreed that elevating buildings could be causing others to flood, and in general, he dismissed what Brody and other scientists had to say about what is causing Houston's flooding problems.

"You need to find some better experts," he said. When asked for names, he would only say, "starting here, with me."

Not a single scientist or expert of a dozen interviewed by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica shared his view on such matters.

"I don't agree with Mr. Talbott at all," said Phil Bedient, a Rice University scientist. "That is an astounding statement. I don't agree with it, and there are a lot of other people that don't either."

Hansen, the Memorial City resident, rejects the idea that local officials can't do anything to help her situation.

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"I have learned that it's government, and things take a very, very long time to get anything done. But you have to keep fighting," she said.
Rapid Growth, "Sitting ducks"
Stacey Summers and her husband sat on their bed with their two small dogs, gazing out the window in shock at snakes swimming by in the rising floodwaters. During the Tax Day flood, the water rushed into their one-story brick house in the northwest Houston suburb of Cypress, in a matter of hours, topping out at nearly a foot.

"It's unimaginable still," said Summers, who evacuated her neighborhood in a canoe, as did many of her neighbors. The creek near her upscale subdivision known as Stable Gate overflowed, flooding almost all of the 250 homes in the neighborhood.

It was the first time the 15-year-old development had flooded. But scientists point to the area as one where development has run amok in recent years, putting more people and property in harm's way.

"Those people up there are sitting ducks," said Bedient, the Rice University scientist.

Because all the water in the area drains into Cypress Creek, it's called the Cypress Creek watershed. In the 1990s, as the population in the watershed grew by 35 percent, two major floods hit the area - both considered "500-year" events, which should have just a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any given year.

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The back-to-back floods spurred a rowdy, beer-fueled gathering at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in 1998 and, soon after, the formation of the Cypress Creek Flood Control Coalition. The hope was to curb further development, or encourage more responsible development, to help prevent flooding.

But little changed, even after another major storm crippled Cypress and the Houston region just three years later - one that scientists say should have served as a wake-up call.

In June 2001, Tropical Storm Allison dumped almost 40 inches of rain on the city in five days, flooding 73,000 residences and 95,000 vehicles. Twenty-two people died, and damage from the storm was more than $5 billion in Harris County. It likely is the worst rainstorm to ever befall an American city in modern history, according to the flood control district.

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Allison was a shock not just because of the extent of flooding but also where it occurred - almost half of the buildings that flooded were outside floodplains designated by FEMA.

The tragedy prompted FEMA and the flood control district to redraw floodplain maps, which expanded as much as 20 percent in some areas. And in conjunction with the city, the district spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve drainage, widen bayous and build detention ponds to temporarily hold floodwater.

But when local politicians tried to change policies over development, they were met with stiff resistance from developers and residents.

The city did pursue a law banning new development or major renovations of existing buildings in areas called floodways - the most vulnerable parts of the 100-year floodplain that are closest to the bayous. That prompted multiple lawsuits, and the law was ultimately severely weakened by the city council two years later.

Still, said Bill White, who was mayor at the time, "It was the most aggressive action that had ever been taken" against such development.

When White's successor, Annise Parker, tried to impose a fee on city residents to pay for drainage improvements, lawsuits followed, too. The proposed fee remains in limbo.

The county's development regulations are superior to the city's and have been strengthened over time, said Steve Radack, a longtime Harris County Commissioner who represents the Cypress area.

But they have to be economically reasonable, he said. If the rules are too strict, developers will say "fine, to heck with Harris County. We'll go build in Fort Bend," the county directly west of Harris County, or wherever else, he said.

In fact, Fort Bend County has stricter regulations for developing in the floodplain - and it's growing faster than Harris County.

Developers there must incorporate more green space or detention ponds than in Harris County. That's because Fort Bend requires them to hold excess floodwater on their properties for longer and discharge it at one-tenth of the rate in Harris County.

"They still have lots of development, it's just that they know how to do it," said Phil Bedient of Rice University, who helped develop Fort Bend County's rules.

Harris County has never prioritized green space, he said, and is now paying the price.

"Mother Nature is wreaking her fury on the county and sending some fairly strong signals that some things need to change."

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Bedient and other experts also say they wish Harris County had been able to buy out more homes that have been badly damaged by floods or that are known to flood repeatedly. Since Allison, the flood control district has purchased about 2,400 such properties, mostly with federal money, and after the Tax Day flood, the district allocated $15 million of local money for more buyouts. A recent study by the agency has identified 3,300 homes that are still at high risk of flooding and should be bought.

The properties that were acquired "will never flood again - the only properties for which we can make such a guarantee," according to the flood control district website. "Unfortunately, there still remain over 140,000 single-home residential parcels identified within the regulated floodplains."

Scientists and experts say communities need to move away from developing in the 100-year floodplain, or at least make the rules for doing so far more stringent. But after Allison, the pace of development in and near floodplains in the Houston area only seemed to accelerate - especially in the Cypress Creek area, where there was still plenty of cheap pastureland.

The same year Allison occurred, Stacey Summers' neighborhood was built. And over the next decade, the Cypress Creek area grew even faster than it had in the previous one.

Between 2000 and 2010, it grew by nearly 70 percent to a population of 587,142 - equivalent to that of Milwaukee. In that same time period, according to a Tribune/ProPublica analysis, the percentage of developed land there jumped from 23 percent to 33 percent.

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Stable Gate was one of many neighborhoods built in the area after Allison. It wasn't in a floodplain when it was built in 2001, but new flood maps that took effect six years later placed a large swath of the subdivision in the 100-year floodplain, triggering flood insurance requirements for many residents. Parts of the neighborhood were also placed in a newly expanded 500-year floodplain - an area with a smaller but still notable chance of flooding each year.

Summers' home ended up in a 500-year floodplain after the new maps took effect. She doesn't need to buy flood insurance, but she still carries it for about $400 a year. Greg Bowen, president of the Stable Gate Homeowners Association, said the neighborhood "was built on the best data they had at the time."

But even with the new flood maps, development has continued in the 100-year floodplains. Since 2010, more than 7,000 residential buildings have been built in these risky areas in Harris County, according to a Tribune/ProPublica analysis of local appraisal data, along with more than 1,600 nonresidential buildings.

Bowen said the county and developers are not installing enough flood control measures or ensuring developers follow the rules for building in a floodplain.

"The bottom line is there needs to be more done to keep up with the growth out in Cypress," he said.

Frank Espinoza recently built 12 homes in the 100-year floodplain along Little Cypress Creek, just a few miles from Stable Gate. Three of them flooded on Tax Day, costing him tens of thousands of dollars to repair.

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The longtime Houston-area homebuilder finished them anyway, and even though he doesn't have to tell buyers, he said he will to avoid lawsuits. But he doesn't think the homes will flood again.

"I just think it was a freak of nature," Espinoza said, noting the elevations of many of the homes that didn't flood are actually lower than the ones that did.

Growth in Cypress and other Houston-area suburbs has been so substantial that the state plans to build a third highway loop around the city. When it's completed in 2021, the Grand Parkway will be large enough to fit the state of Rhode Island inside of it.

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The highway will cut down on commute times, but critics - including the environmental group Sierra Club, which sued to try to stop its construction - say it will encourage even more suburban sprawl and wetland loss and worsen flooding problems.

That new development will not only make Cypress more vulnerable, but it also will impact flooding problems downstream, scientists say. That's because there is less green space to absorb rainfall, causing more - and faster - runoff into Cypress Creek, which spills into several streams that flow southeast toward downtown Houston and the coast.

Dick Smith, co-founder and longtime president of the Cypress Creek Flood Control Coalition, said his group has worked for more than a decade to encourage the county to plan for the impact of new growth. He said he'd like to see it act more like Fort Bend County.

But the flood control district has "stiff-armed" them multiple times, he said.

They'll never be able to totally prevent flooding, Smith said, but "they could do a hell of a lot better job than they're doing."

Smith's home first flooded in 1994, and has since flooded four more times. Tax Day was the worst, he said, when 35 inches of water accumulated on his ground floor.

At the raucous 1998 VFW meeting that inspired Smith and his neighbors to form the coalition, he recalled someone demanding they put the local county commissioner's "ass in a boat" to tour the extensive damage.

Nearly 20 years later, that county commissioner - Radack - is still fielding angry feedback from residents.

At an August town hall, Radack told more than 300 seething attendees packed into a church auditorium that they were part of the problem. He said it all came down to paying for flood control projects and said he would vote for a tax increase to do so.

"This is what this is all about," he said, repeatedly. "Government - it takes money."

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But residents urged Radack to support stricter development criteria and enforce the existing rules. They also repeatedly said the county should somehow curb growth outright.

"Just stop building," one woman yelled, inciting cheers.

"A whole lot of you people live in subdivisions that in many people's opinion should have never been built," Radack responded. "But people have a right to development. They own the land, if they follow the rules."

"But they're not," several people in the crowd shouted in unison.

Asked about such sentiments, Talbott said resident expectations are too high.

"I've heard the members of the public say they never want their streets to flood, and they don't want their houses to flood," he said. "That's just unrealistic."
The Reservoir Predicament
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If development in the Cypress Creek area grew after Tropical Storm Allison, it grew even more quickly in the area around Addicks Reservoir - one of two massive World War II-era detention basins meant to protect central Houston from catastrophic flooding.

In 2001, 28 percent of the land in the Addicks watershed was developed. By 2010, it was 41 percent. And Virginia Hammond's home is perched on the northern edge of the reservoir .

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Addicks and its counterpart, Barker Reservoir, in the 1940s after back-to-back mega storms put downtown Houston underwater. At the time, the Army Corps had a singular mission: to protect Houston, which was then some 15 miles away from the reservoirs. But 70 years later, achieving that goal has become more difficult as Houston's suburban sprawl has encroached on them.

During heavy rainfall, the Corps shutters conduits on the reservoir's tall, earthen dams to keep a torrent of water from rushing down down Buffalo Bayou - a narrow, winding waterway that passes through downtown on its way to the coast.

The reservoirs are dry most of the time, covered in woods and parkland. But Army Corps officials say the amount of water that accumulates in the reservoirs during big storms has increased substantially in recent decades, and takes longer to drain out. That's because much of the open space around them has been covered with non-absorbent concrete.

When those pools get too large, the Army Corps is forced into a precarious balancing act where it has to keep just enough water inside the reservoirs to protect areas downstream while also releasing enough water so that surrounding neighborhoods, including Hammond's subdivision, aren't flooded.

"We're between a rock and a hard place," said Richard K. Long, who helps oversee the day-to-day operation of Addicks and Barker for the Corps.

In an ideal world, neighborhoods like Hammond's wouldn't exist, he acknowledged.

Hammond's neighbor, retired engineer Ali Aumir, whose home also has flooded three times, agrees: "This whole area should never have been built." Long said there was no way the Corps - or anyone - could've predicted 70 years ago the kind of growth the Houston area has seen. If it had, he says the Corps probably would've done things differently - bought up more land around the reservoirs, for example, or at least acquired easements allowing the agency to flood it when necessary. (The Corps has such legal agreements for most of its reservoirs.)

The agency has little to no control over development, though. Long says its hands were tied by local politicians and other factors, including the whims of various presidents and congresses with differing views on how much land the government should own and who controls the Army Corps budget.

"Today if we were starting over again knowing what has happened, would our battle lines be a little different? Yeah, our battle lines would definitely be different. But we don't have that pleasure of doing that," Long said. After the Tax Day storm, the amount of water that accumulated in Addicks and Barker reached record highs, forcing the Army Corps to release more water from the reservoirs than normal. That resulted in flooding of areas both downstream and upstream of the reservoirs, including a subdivision called Bear Creek Village just south of Hammond's.

That area flooded twice. The first time, it flooded because rainwater overwhelmed drainage systems and streams. The second time, the Corps had closed the dams in Addicks reservoir, causing the stored water to back up into neighborhood streets.

It's lucky homes didn't flood the second time around, Long said. If the rain had fallen closer to the reservoirs, the situation would have been much worse.

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Of the 10 largest pools that have accumulated in the reservoirs, nine have occurred since 1990 and six of those were since 2000. Long says that's directly correlated with all the new growth and development.

On top of the balancing act triggered by major storms, the extra water that's accumulated in the reservoirs has strained their earthen dams, which have been considered in critical condition for seven years in large part because of what would happen if they failed. The Army Corps says they are nowhere close to failure but estimates damage of about $60 billion if a breach were to occur. More than 1 million residents downstream from them would be impacted.

The more immediate risk, though, is to nearby residents like Hammond who may be flooded during the next big storm. Such neighborhoods are not just at increased risk; Long said they also are adding to the problem because their drainage systems are sending more water into the reservoirs. Development in the Cypress area upstream from the reservoirs is also making things worse.

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It has led to increased runoff into Cypress Creek during major storms, causing it to escape its banks and spill into four other streams on the south side of State Highway 290, in a completely different watershed. The phenomenon has been called "the overflow problem."

Original plans for the Addicks and Barker reservoirs included a levee that would've prevented the overflow problem and a canal that would have evacuated more water out of the reservoirs. Those components were dropped due to some combination of time and money, Long said - decisions that would come back to haunt the Army Corps decades later.

The flood control district has said it will split the $3 million cost to study the impact of development on the reservoirs with the Corps, but Congress hasn't yet authorized the funding. Any study will only mark the beginning of what could be a long and expensive process; more studies are likely to be needed, Long said.

In the meantime, the flood control district is taking steps to protect Addicks and Barker from the effects of future growth. This year, it strengthened rules for new developments around the two reservoirs and in parts of the Cypress Creek watershed. Developers in those areas must now account for not only the rate at which water leaves their lots but also the volume that ends up draining into the reservoirs.

It's a step in the right direction, Rice University's Bedient said, but also "a day late and a dollar short" with the area around the reservoirs already so densely developed.

The flood control district also is looking at building another large reservoir to ease the stress on Addicks and Barker. But the agency hasn't officially proposed the project and has no timeline for doing so, district engineer Dena Green said. That's in part because of how expensive it will be, she said.

Bedient said the additional reservoir "is absolutely a critical necessity" if the county wants to avoid another scenario like the Tax Day flood.

"They have no choice," he said. "If they don't do that, we're going to get another one of these, you know, maybe not in five years but ... within the next decade. It's just absurd."
Longtime problem, Little progress
Houston has been trying to solve its flooding woes since at least 1937, when a letter penned by local officials to state lawmakers pleaded for help and declared Texas' largest city "at the mercy of the relentless water."

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Two horrible storms had struck the city in the previous eight years. Flooding, officials wrote, was a "constant menace" - endangering thousands of human lives and "millions of dollars in private, municipal and other governmental capital investments" and potentially causing "the distress of all of the peoples of Texas."

After nearly eight decades of massive engineering projects, incredible technological advances and a flurry of regulations for flood control, that letter still rings true. But now millions of lives and billions of dollars are at stake.

Why has so little changed after so long?

It's true that Houston is naturally prone to flooding. The "Bayou City" is incredibly flat and near a coast along a warming ocean. And much of it was built before people knew what they know now about drainage and floodplain regulation.

But scientists say the fundamental problem is that Houstonians have assumed they can simply engineer their way out of flooding.

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Indeed, Talbott insists that the only solution to Houston's flooding woes is to continue widening thousands of miles of bayous across the region so they can carry more rainwater into the Gulf of Mexico. At a cost of $25 billion, with a current spending rate of $80 million a year, that will take 400 years, he said - and Congress has been unwilling to provide any extra funds to speed up the process.

Even then, the widening projects would only ensure that the area's bayous can handle 100-year events - nothing like a Tax Day flood, which Talbott said it is impossible to plan for or prevent.

Experts say that is a sorely misguided view.

"I reject that somebody with the sophisticated resources like Houston couldn't do something," said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

Berginnis and other experts say Houston-area officials could work to preserve green space; strengthen regulation on development; plan for a changing climate; and work harder to remove the 140,000 homes that remain in the 100-year floodplain.

Other cities are trying those approaches. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, Berginnis pointed out, plans to eventually get rid of all habitable buildings in the 100-year floodplain. And many cities are also realizing they must prepare for more severe rainfall.

In Florida, the City of Fort Lauderdale's recent vision plan includes an entire chapter on climate change preparedness and resiliency. And Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale is located, strictly regulates development in areas that are pegged to be at or below sea level in the future, said Nancy Gassman, the city's assistant public works director for sustainability. After Boulder, Colorado experienced horrible flooding in 2013, the city is working to redesign infrastructure with "permeable surfaces" - surfaces that can absorb some floodwater, as opposed to concrete - and leaving more open space. The idea is to do so not just with a "100-year flood" in mind, but a more rare flood, such as what happened three years ago.

"We don't see an event around Boulder in the last thousand years that was as crazy as that one. So yes, freak event," said Hayhoe, the Texas Tech climate scientist. "Is Boulder preparing? They're still preparing because they know in a warmer world, the chance of heavier rainfall is greater."

Costello, Houston's flood czar, said he is aiming to secure about $10 million in the next city budget to create a "response team" that would carry out smaller, quick-hit flooding projects. The city also secured a $250,000 state grant in August to improve its early warning system.

But the region has many other competing priorities.

"Are we doing everything we can?" said Radack, the Harris County commissioner. "No, we're not doing everything we can because we still have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the hospital district. We still have to build roads. We certainly want to have parks."

He also indicated there was little chance that the city or county would be able to implement stricter regulations on development in floodplains, even though the neighboring county, Fort Bend, has been able to do so.

Not only are the rules lax, critics say, but also local officials don't always enforce them. Costello, Houston's flood czar, agrees.

"Some of the residents are saying that we don't have the resources to go out and police what has been done," he said of irresponsible development. "If you drive around parts of the city, you'll get confirmation of that. ... This is a very big city, and we have limited resources."

(The flood control district said it has plenty of resources to police development in Harris County, though experts and residents strongly disagree.)

21

And the Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates development in coastal wetlands, only has about 10 people in charge of making sure the rules are followed for all of Texas and Louisiana.

"Our budget is fixed by Congress, and it's been flatlined for three or five years," said Kimberly Baggette, chief of the regulatory division at the Army Corps' Galveston District. (Whether that will change under the new president remains to be seen.)

Texas Congressman John Culberson insisted that the agencies in charge of dealing with flooding in his district have always gotten the money they asked for. The Houston Republican also said the planned third reservoir would help the city prepare for a bigger flood event.

But he believes the Texas Legislature will have to fund such a project, which the flood control district estimated last year would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the district has said there is not even a timeline to recommend where exactly to build the additional reservoir or how to fund it.

Aside from the distant reservoir plans, it remains unclear whether many Houstonians realize that nothing is being done to address floods like the one that happened on Tax Day. Democratic Congressman Al Green said he was counting on his colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives to fund some key bayou-widening projects in the coming months - though he understands they only aim to protect against much smaller events.

"I'm going to maintain a level of optimism," he said. "We should not have another catastrophic event and then bemoan the fact that we didn't do what we could have and should have done, so that's an argument that I make."

At a community clubhouse meeting in Houston this summer, Costello assured the people in attendance that the city was doing everything it could to address recent flooding issues. The meeting was organized by Residents Against Flooding, the group suing the city in hopes of getting certain flood protection projects built.

Asked in an interview the next day if the city could feasibly protect against recent floods, Costello said, "No."

"I don't think they were following me as well as I hoped," he said, adding that once the group gets the project they're pushing for in the lawsuit, "There's still going to be areas that are flood prone and it's still going to exist there."

"I don't think they realize that."

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When Climate Change Meets Sprawl: Why Houston's 'Once-In-A-Lifetime' Floods Keep Happening

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Climate change will bring more frequent and fierce rainstorms to cities like Houston. But unchecked development remains a priority in the famously un-zoned city, creating short-term economic gains for some while increasing flood risks for everyone. 1 It was 2 a.m. on April 18.

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The following list was compiled by an amazing group of storytellers from around the world. Last semester, while I was teaching Building Storyworlds: the art, craft & biz of storytelling in 21c at Columbia University, I reached out via a facebook post for immersive storytelling platform, app, resource and tool recommendations.

Each semester my students design, prototype and present an immersive adaption of Sherlock Holmes. I shared some of the following list with the class in an effort to provide a sandbox for their experimentation. Since the semester ended, I've discovered a few additional resources that I've included below.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed (see list at the end of the post). Please feel free to add anything that may have been missed.

Before you jump to the list I need your help. I'm currently preparing for a new immersive storytelling course that I'll be teaching this fall at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Students from across the University will be working to design, build and produce a special "de-escalation" room that will be presented to the public at the end of the semester.

Course description: What if we built an immersive storytelling experience that modeled negative conversations and behaviors found on social media platforms? Inside of this environment, situations quickly escalate. But this time, we would be able to do something about it.

Imagine a space where a diversity of participants work together through story, play, design and collaboration to de-escalate situations that stem from misunderstanding and polarization. To create this "De-Escalation Room" we'll harness emerging technologies, storytelling, collaborative methodologies and field research to design and build an innovative immersive storytelling experience that can scale.

Teams of students will work to design, build and deploy a digital storytelling experience modeled on data derived from research conducted by SAFELab within the school of social work. SAFELab's research examines a rise in real world violence linked to social media behavior.

This course combines project work, mentors, and collaborative methods to create a dynamic, hands-on environment that mixes story, code and experience design. It will guide students through a design process uniquely tailored for experiential environments, combining elements at the cutting edge of immersive storytelling in film, gaming, theater, and emerging technology. In addition, teams will have the opportunity to share work and receive feedback from working industry professionals, across a variety of disciplines.

WANTED: Mentors, partners, organizations and others who are interested in helping to make the "De-Escalation" room framework a reality. Our goal is to release our efforts under a creative commons license so others can experiment, remix and continue to build upon an open resource. If you're interested please contact me at hello [at] digitalstorytellinglab [dot] com for more details.

Now onto the list...

Invision- The world's leading prototyping, collaboration & workflow platform

Blippar provides solutions that harness augmented reality, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and visual search technologies.

HoloKit, the low cost open source mixed reality experience, which includes the HeadKit cardboard headset and TrackKit software. With your smartphone and Mixed Reality apps, HoloKit provides you access to the world of Mixed Reality right in your hands, affordably.

Augmented Reality in 10 lines of HTML - Do you want to do Augmented Reality on the web ? You can now do it in 10 lines of HTML! Seriously!

Eko presents interactive VR short film Broken Night at Tribeca Film Festival where the viewer can influence the story.

Viar360- Providing easy to use virtual reality tools to create interactive, immersive VR stories that can be shared and embedded.

Sequel- Create media and entertainment bots without writing code to engage over 3 billion users on messaging apps. Sequel is an easy to use drag-and-drop authoring and publishing tool.

Conducttr is a story-gaming platform that allows you to develop and deploy immersive scenario-based experiences.

SAM Labs- Build and program IoT based prototypes with SAM, a collection of wireless blocks and a drag and drop interface.

With shiftr.io the process of interconnecting objects, devices and apps becomes more accessible and less complex. Regardless of whether you are building an interactive installation, prototyping the next connected product or simply playing around with new technologies, shiftr.io lets you add connectivity to your project in the early stage.

Kinoma helps you to make "things" scriptable. Take IoT project ideas from prototype to production with a suite of tools and services.

Makey Makey - Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to your world and start inventing the future.

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Data Doesn't Lie a story by Jim Munroe with Illustrations by Luc Allenet de Ribemont

TextureWriter, makes creating interactive fiction easy via a drag and drop interface. A nice feature is TextureWriter's approachable word-on-word mechanic suitable for touchscreens, phones and browsers.

Appy Pie is a mobile app creator released for Android, iOS, Fire OS, and Windows Phone platforms that allows its users to create and monetize different types of mobile apps.

Sketchfab is empowering a new era of creativity by making it easy for anyone to publish, share, and discover 3D content on the web or in VR. With a community of over 1 million creators who have published over 1.5 million scenes, Sketchfab is the world's largest platform for immersive and interactive 3D.

GuriVR - You need not be a coder to create VR experiences. The GuriVR editor interprets your words and creates the world. Describe your VR experience and the editor will do the rest.

Panda Suite - Create content for mobile, tablet and desktop without any coding in iOS/Android/HTML5. Play with Panda's native sensors and technologies: 3D, virtual reality or beacon sensors.

Quasar Framework - Build desktop & phone/tablet apps simultaneously. Create responsive sites, hybrid mobile Apps and Electron apps with VueJs 2.

Shadertoy is the first application to allow developers all over the globe to push pixels from code to screen using WebGL

Hatch for Good acts like a concierge, connecting you to a suite of tools and a growing community to help you leverage storytelling to drive social impact

With Esri Story Maps, you can combine your maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content to create compelling, user-friendly web apps.

Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex things.

StoryStylus is a simplified narrative game engine developed by One More Story Games (OMSG). StoryStylus was designed with authors in mind - the developers have also successfully taught over 100 children aged 8+ how to create their own narrative games using the engine. OMSG is adapting "Shakespeare's Landlord," a novel by #1 NYT bestselling author Charlaine Harris with StoryStylus.

Special thanks to: Siobhan O'Flynn, Trevor Haldenby, Elizabeth Strickler, Michael Monello, Leon Moodley, Simone Nelson, Ira Deutchman, Laura Ruggiero, Heidi McDonald, Annie Laurie Malarkey, Simon Staffans, Jim Gunshanan, Jeff Watson, Lorri Hopping, Gary Hayes, Ryan Majestic, Loren Heyns, Aramique Krauthamer, Andrew Schneider, Fabienne Olivier, Heidi Miller, Susan Ne Hofer, Jason Lempieri, Dan Mirvish and anyone else who contributed to the discussion I may have missed.

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30+ Immersive Storytelling platforms, apps, resources & tools

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The following list was compiled by an amazing group of storytellers from around the world. Last semester, while I was teaching Building Storyworlds: the art, craft & biz of storytelling in 21c at Columbia University, I reached out via a facebook post for immersive storytelling platform, app, resource and tool recommendations.

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From the hallowed vineyards of Spain's city of Valladolid, bottles of red wine navigate a long journey toward the increasingly thirsty consumers of China's middle class. Usually, they go by sea, but an assortment of rail connections - launched in 2011 and heavily promoted under the transcontinental trade initiative, "One Belt, One Road" - has given merchants new routes to and from China.

Huang Jiangjiao, a Chinese entrepreneur who started his red wine business in 2011, now ships about 20 to 30 percent of his bottles by train. "I was looking for a faster way to ship wine from Spain to China, because I sometimes get express orders from clients," he tells Sixth Tone.

These in-demand boxes of Vizar wine will travel through seven countries, passing the Kazakh-Chinese border, before ultimately reaching China's eastern city of Yiwu, a place known for its manufacturing and exporting prowess. Much like the rest of the country, Yiwu is eager to build a reputation for importing, too.

The current 65 rail routes through Eurasia are collectively known as the China Railway Express. They mostly use the same tracks, but service different cities in Europe and China. Yiwu is the starting point for the longest railway connection, which chugs all the way to Madrid. As the train makes its way to and from Spain, the containers have to be hoisted onto new wheels three times because of differing track-widths between the seven countries.

Since the Yiwu-Madrid route launched, there have been 412 outbound trips to Spain, and only 105 trips to China, according to Yiwu Timex Industrial Investment Co. Ltd - the company operating all trains between Yiwu and Europe.

China Railway executive Han Xiao claims that train transport is 80 percent cheaper than air and twice as fast as maritime transport. Conversely, however, it is also slower and more expensive, respectively. For wine vendor Huang, only express deliveries make financial sense to send by rail, so he ships the bulk of his inventory by sea. "It's much cheaper," he says. Transporting a standard 40-foot container of goods by rail costs $2,500, according to Feng Xubin, CEO of Timex. Ocean freight costs a little over $200 per container.

Nevertheless, there have been over 11,000 China Railway Express trips as of October. Dubbed "the Silk Railroad" after the famed trading routes of yesteryear, the project aims to strengthen trade between China and Europe. To get a closer look, Sixth Tone reporters traveled to Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and Yiwu to trace this 21st-century Silk Road.

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From the hallowed vineyards of Spain's city of Valladolid, bottles of red wine navigate a long journey toward the increasingly thirsty consumers of China's middle class. Usually, they go by sea, but an assortment of rail connections - launched in 2011 and heavily promoted under the transcontinental trade initiative, "One Belt, One Road" - has given merchants new routes to and from China.

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Why the history of bicycles and women's rights go hand-in-hand:

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A refugee family's first month in the U.S.

As American Airlines Flight 1804 approached Sea-Tac Airport, Birkha Biswa stared at a sea of green trees, skyscrapers and dense neighborhoods below.

Birkha, 33, was amazed at the number of planes parked on the runways and the maze of highways circling the airport. Once inside the terminal, he was wowed by the variety of faces bustling past.

Just a few days before, Birkha, his wife, Sunita, and their two daughters, Prashana, 13, and Pranshu, 8, had left their bamboo home in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal and boarded a plane for the first time in their lives.

Birkha had once feared he would never see his mother, father and siblings again.

But on this August evening, he scanned the crowds near the baggage carousel and spotted his father, Chatur. After years of being stateless and separated by thousands of miles from his loved ones, Birkha was finally back in their embrace.

The Biswa family was among the more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalis who were expelled from or fled the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in the early 1990s after years of political unrest following the government's adoption of a "One Nation, One People" policy. That policy, among other actions, banned the teaching of the Nepali language, forced people to adopt the Bhutanese national dress and denied citizenship to many ethnic Nepalis.

In 1992, 15 members of the Biswa family fled their home in the back of a truck, after quickly selling off their livestock and the land they had farmed for generations. They crossed India and found safety at the Pathri refugee camp in eastern Nepal.

Family members remember that there initially wasn't enough to eat at the camps. Eventually, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees brought beans, rice and salt, and then rations of vegetables and flour. Schools and a hospital were built. But jobs and opportunities were limited.

Starting in 2009, waves of the Biswa family were resettled in Tukwila. Birkha, Sunita and their daughters were the last of the family to leave the refugee camp, exchanging tearful goodbyes as they departed this summer.

Their relatives in South King County live in apartments within walking distance. Many grow their own food at a Bhutanese community garden near Foster High School. Some work at packing companies, hotels and the airport. One is an Uber driver. Three young women in the family attend college with plans to become doctors.

Those family members are now teaching Birkha, Sunita and their daughters the skills to adapt to their new lives in Washington state.

Story and photography: Erika Schultz

Videography: Lauren Frohne, Erika Schultz and Corinne Chin

Video editing: Lauren Frohne

Web development: Audrey Carlsen

Project editors: Danny Gawlowski and Jim Simon

This Seattle Times project was a collaboration with ART WORKS Projects "Sanctuary/Sustenance: The Story of Many Journeys" an international multimedia exhibition, the University of Washington Center for Global Studies, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and University of Washington Libraries, as well as the King County Library System and the KCLS Foundation.

A special thanks goes to the Seattle office of the International Rescue Committee.

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30 Days: A refugee family's first month in the U.S.

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A refugee family's first month in the U.S. As American Airlines Flight 1804 approached Sea-Tac Airport, Birkha Biswa stared at a sea of green trees, skyscrapers and dense neighborhoods below. Birkha, 33, was amazed at the number of planes parked on the runways and the maze of highways circling the airport.

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The world's largest functioning fog collection project is setting an example for other projects globally.

By Valeria Cardi

SIDI IFNI, Morocco, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Growing up on Mount Boutmezguida in southwest Morocco on the edge of the Sahara desert, Khadija Ghouate never imagined that the fog enveloping the nearby peaks would change her life.

For hours every day and often before sunrise, Ghouate and other women from nearby villages would walk 5 km (3 miles) to fetch water from open wells, with girls pulled out of school to help and at risk of violence on the lonely treks.

But with groundwater levels dropping due to overuse, drought and climate change, the challenge to get enough water daily was becoming harder, and almost half of people in the local area sold up and quit rural life after generations for the city.

As the future of the traditional Berber region by Mount Boutmezguida floundered, a mathematician whose family came from the area had a eureka moment gleaned from living overseas - using fog to make water.

Now Ghouate's village is connected to the world's largest functioning fog collection project, alleviating the need to collect water that fell mainly on women, and with state-of-the-art equipment setting an example for other projects globally.

"You always had to go to the wells, always be there, mornings, evenings," said Ghouate, a mother-of-three, as she prepared lunch for her family, showing off the tap in her home.

"But now water has arrived in our house. I like fog a lot.

The project, running since 2015 after nine years of surveys and tests, was founded by the Moroccan non-government organisation Dar Si Hmad, which works to promote and preserve local culture, history, and heritage.

It was the brainchild of mathematician and businessman Aissa Derhem whose parents were originally from Mount Boutmezguida where the slopes are covered in mist on average 130 days a year.

Derhem first came across fog collection when he learnt of one of the world's first projects - in Chile's Atacama Desert - while he living in Canada in the 1980s studying for his PhD.

But it was not until visiting his parents' village years later that he realised the mountainous location, situated at the edge of the Sahara and about 35 km (22 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, was perfect for fog.

IDEAL LOCATION

Mist accumulates in coastal areas where a cold sea current, an anticyclone and a land obstacle, such as a mountain range, combine. "When the sea water evaporates, the anticyclone ... stops it from becoming rain, and when it hits the mountain, that's where it can be gathered," Derhem told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, looking out from the top of Mount Boutmezguida besides a small building used as a fog observatory and tool deposit.

"If we look at the planet, we see this happening in all tropical regions ... In Chile and Peru in Latin America. The Kalahari desert in Africa. In Western Australia. Around the Thar desert in India and in California," he listed as examples.

Developed in South America in the 1980s, fog collection projects have since spread globally to countries including Guatemala, Ghana, Eritrea, Nepal and the United States.

In Morocco, Dar Si Hmad has built a system of nets stretching about 870 square metres - about 4.5 tennis courts.

These nets are hung between two poles and when wind pushes the fog through the mesh, water droplets are trapped, condense and fall into a container at the bottom of the unit with pipes connecting the water to reservoirs.

Derhem hopes the success of the Mount Boutmezguida scheme can help other areas in West Africa and in North Africa - where the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says fresh water resources are among the world's lowest.

Studies show climate change impacting water patterns globally and Derhem said in Morocco levels have dropped to about 500 cubic metres a person a year from about 1,500 cubic metres a person in the 1960s on calculations based on government figures.

The principles behind fog collection are simple, and throughout nature examples exist of creatures capturing moisture from the air in the most arid conditions, ranging from beetles in the Namib Desert to lizards in the Australian outback.

But creating a water collection project on a large scale comes with challenges, as the research and development, as well as the infrastructure and technology involved in expanding and developing fog collection projects, can be costly.

The project at Mount Boutmezguida, however, has been a trailblazer for other projects due to its equipment, according to its founders.

The original nets used were insufficiently resistant to the high winds and tore but a partnership with the German non-profit WaterFoundation allowed Dar Si Hmad to develop a stronger net.

The CloudFisher was described by the WaterFoundation as the first maintance-free fog collector that can withstand wind speeds of up 120 kph with flexible troughs following the movement of the net in the wind.

Now collected water is filtered and combined with underground water before being distributed to villages on the grid with homes paying for water through a pre-paid system.

The initial pilot project served five villages. At present, the 870 square metres of nets installed reach about 140 families - 14 villages - while a second set of nets is being built.

"Fog is like aeroplanes at the start. At the beginning they were only little toys but, with some effort, things have changed ... but it needs investment," said Derhem.

"Along the coast, there is three times as much fog as there is available on Mount Boutmezguida. The government spends millions for water desalination processes. This is something that is worth exploring."

For with dry wells comes anxiety and risk but also the unravelling of traditional livelihoods and communities.

Mohamed Zabour, president of the local municipality, said more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of the region live without running water in their homes.

Between 2004 and 2014, 2,000 of the 5,000 local residents moved to cities.

"Our region is rich but it needs infrastructure. And water is one of the priorities," said Zabour.

"If we don't find a solution in the next 10 years, it's going to be a catastrophe ... It's going to be like a desert. Empty."

For Ghouate, the fog scheme has improved village life.

"When we were kids, we didn't even know what it meant to need water ... Now there is less rain and if I still had to go to the wells, I wouldn't find much water now," she said.

"Everything is about water, everything. I don't have to worry about it anymore."

(Reporting by Valeria Cardi, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith @BeeGoldsmith Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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The fog catchers conjuring water out of Moroccan mist

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The world's largest functioning fog collection project is setting an example for other projects globally. By Valeria Cardi SIDI IFNI, Morocco, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Growing up on Mount Boutmezguida in southwest Morocco on the edge of the Sahara desert, Khadija Ghouate never imagined that the fog enveloping the nearby peaks would change her life.

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Around 65 million people are fleeing conflict in countries like Syria and Yemen today - 75 percent of whom live in cities, where battles are increasingly taking place, says the ICRC

By Nita Bhalla

NAIROBI, May 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of people are using their smartphones to experience the devastation of urban conflict through an augmented reality app which aims to raise awareness of the suffering faced by millions trapped by war, the app's developer said on Monday.

Launched by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in March, "Enter the room" provides a visceral, first-person experience of war through the eyes of child from their bedroom.

While there are numerous apps being designed by aid groups, this is the first known use of augmented reality (AR) by the humanitarian sector to simulate civilian life at war. The app has been downloaded more than 50,000 times since its launch.

Entering through a portal on the screen of their device, users experience the impact of years of fighting in accelerated time as the virtual child's bedroom room transforms from a place of light and laughter to one of darkness and suffering.

"It (AR) makes war real in a powerful and new way and pushes the audience to really think about this question: What if this happened to your childhood bedroom, or your son or daughter's?" said the ICRC's Digital Content Manager Ariel Rubin.

"We spend our lives on our smartphones, walking around with our eyes glued to them. There is something incredibly moving about mapping this virtual reality onto our actual reality - and within that creating a narrative that tells a real story."

Around 65 million people are fleeing conflict in countries like Syria and Yemen today - 75 percent of whom live in cities, where battles are increasingly taking place, says the ICRC.

Yet many of urban conflicts are being waged using weaponry designed for open battlefields, say aid workers, resulting in greater destruction in these highly populated towns and cities.

As a result, vital infrastructure from medical facilities to basic services such as electricity and water are being hit.

In Yemen, for example, there has been a total collapse of the healthcare system, water and sewage network, the food chain, and the most basic building blocks for a healthy and functioning society - all because of the war, said Rubin.

"It is easy to get lost in the numbers and forget that each and every number represents a human being. Many of them are children who see their bedrooms, homes, their childhoods be totally destroyed by war," he said.

"Our hope is that the AR app will help connect people to this reality that millions of people are facing every day in their cities."

Augmented reality apps for gaming such as Pokémon GO have become increasingly popular in recent years, but they are also being developed as online shopping and education tools.

Preliminary reviews of 'Enter the room' have been largely positive.

"The chance to use augmented reality to generate empathy towards the victims of these ignored conflicts is an exciting application of this new technology," said one user's review on Apple's App Store.

"Hopefully, it can lead to meaningful change in the world's response to the continuing slaughter of innocents in places like Syria, Central African Republic, Sudan and Yemen."

(Reporting by Nita Bhalla @nitabhalla, Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Forget Pokémon GO, Red Cross augmented reality app brings war to you

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Around 65 million people are fleeing conflict in countries like Syria and Yemen today - 75 percent of whom live in cities, where battles are increasingly taking place, says the ICRC By Nita Bhalla NAIROBI, May 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of people are using their smartphones to experience the devastation of urban conflict through an augmented reality app which aims to raise awareness of the suffering faced by millions trapped by war, the app's developer said on Monday.

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Explore an island threatened by climate change through the eyes of three children who call it home. FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project present "The Last Generation."

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Time and M ic present

Life After Addiction

After video of their overdose went viral, a couple got a chance at redemption

Story by Alice Park | Photographs by Jeffrey Stockbridge for TIME

The video is hard to watch. A middle-aged man is bent backward over a bus-stop bench, eyes closed, head brushing the ground and a cell phone in his outstretched hand. It rings, but the man doesn't move. A few feet away, dangerously close to the road, a woman lies facedown on the sidewalk, her legs buckled under her. She tries to get up but can't make it, and collapses back down in a heap.

The pair are in what's known as the medical district of Memphis, near a major academic hospital, but people walk by without a second glance. Others take out their phones and start recording. "Look, they on the good gas, man," says one of the people who streamed the scene to Facebook Live. Another starts an impromptu rap: "Percocet, she pop a Percocet, she on the Xanax."

The footage quickly went viral and was viewed millions of times.

The man in the video is named Ron Hiers and the woman is his wife Carla. They had just picked up heroin and, too impatient to wait until they got home, walked into the bathroom of a nearby Walgreens and shot up. Then they headed for the bus stop and passed out.

It took a dose of naloxone-a drug that paramedics, emergency medical technicians and even law-enforcement officers have started carrying for the ballooning number of narcotic overdoses they see-to revive Ron and Carla. They were taken to the hospital, and then police took Carla to jail for outstanding charges of petty theft. Ron found his way back home.

"I felt sorry for her," Ron says in his first extended interview, almost one year after the video was shot. "But I also thought, There's more for me." Ron says he injected Carla's portion of the heroin and then took what was left of his monthly prescription of Xanax pills, about four dozen of them, hoping they would put an end to more than four decades of pain and addiction. They almost did.

"That's what drugs and alcohol will do to you. It'll take you places you can't imagine."

The video of Ron and Carla's overdose is part of a grim genre that has emerged alongside the deadliest drug crisis in American history. Every day across the country, nearly 100 people die from overdoses of opioids, powerful narcotic painkillers that attach to cells and dull pain, slow breathing and bring on an overall sense of calm and satisfaction. Since 1999, the rate of fatal prescription opioid overdoses in the U.S. has quadrupled. In 2015, drug overdoses claimed more lives than car accidents and gun violence and rivaled the HIV/AIDS crisis at its peak. The toll, as the White House commission on the crisis put it, is the equivalent of the 9/11 attacks every three weeks.

It is an epidemic without boundaries, touching every corner of the nation, every income group and virtually every age, including a baby born in opioid withdrawal every 25 minutes. In a September study on mortality in the U.S., researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that opioids contributed to a decline in the life expectancy of Americans from 2000 to 2015. Indeed, in some parts of the country, bodies pile up so quickly that medical examiners have resorted to storing the overflow in makeshift freezers when their morgues are full. In big cities and small towns alike, police officers are responding to more and more overdose calls, limiting their ability to address other crimes.

Even many firefighters now are expected to use naloxone, and are being called out to revive addicts who overdose so frequently they know them by name.

In response to the growing crisis, President Trump declared a national public-health emergency on Oct. 26, which means federal agencies have 90 days to redirect existing resources to fighting the epidemic. It was a broad call to action, but one that failed to allocate much-needed new funding to address the crisis. The President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which issued its final recommendations days after the President's declaration, also stopped short of providing more dollars for the epidemic, while calling for measures such as tightening regulations on opioid prescriptions, expanding the use of drug courts as an alternative to incarceration and enhancing access to addiction treatments and overdose medications like naloxone.

As the epidemic has worsened, it's become clear that existing strategies and resources aren't sufficient. Many states already restrict how much opioids doctors can prescribe, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the unprecedented step last summer to pull from the market medications for which the addictive dangers outweigh the painkilling benefits. The agency, along with the CDC, is pushing for changes in the way opioids are prescribed, including limiting the number of pills doctors can prescribe at one time and restricting the conditions for which opioids can be dispensed. Pharmacies are also addressing the crisis; CVS announced this fall that it will only reimburse its beneficiaries for seven days of a prescription and will only dispense short-acting opioids and not long-acting versions to first-time users. And last month Walgreens announced it will start selling the overdose-reversal drug Narcan over the counter-a move that can be seen as an acknowledgment of just how widespread the problem has become.

These efforts, however, have had unintended consequences. Restricting access to legal opioids has led to an explosion of illegal substitutes that have similar narcotic effects. Drugs such as heroin, fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 are cheaper and in many cases more harmful than legal opioids because they are synthetic formulations with no FDA standards for safety and quality control.

From 2002 to 2015, deaths from heroin overdose increased more than sixfold, and in 2016, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported more than 30,000 seizures of fentanyl, a dramatic spike from the 5,000 documented in 2014. The man-made formulas are so powerful that police officers participating in drug raids where fentanyl is confiscated have overdosed simply by breathing in particles of the drug released into the air. The opioid epidemic may have been sparked by prescription medications, but it's now as much a label for a much larger addiction crisis in the U.S., spanning dozens of drugs both legal and not.

The toll has been evident in Memphis, where Ron and Carla overdosed on that sunny fall day. Between 2010 and 2015, deaths from drug overdoses increased by 40%. But statistics can seem like abstractions, numbers to be glossed over rather than felt as actual loss.

Understanding how this crisis is upending lives, devastating families and changing communities requires hearing the stories of those with the most at stake. On Oct. 3, 2016, Ron and Carla Hiers became an official part of the grim record, their overdoses added to the several hundred tallied in the city that year, and to the tens of thousands documented for the country. "That's what drugs and alcohol will do to you," says Ron. "It'll take you places you can't imagine."

This is their story.

"I can't say that I really ever thought that I had a drug problem."

Ron Hiers was born in Memphis in 1955 with a cleft palate. Surgery corrected the birth defect, but left him with a nasal twang that became a target of his classmates' ridicule. He says he was bullied throughout school and had a knack for finding trouble. He was expelled from high school after a series of incidents, including threatening a teacher, and began drifting across the South, working construction to stay afloat.

After he fell during a construction job and broke his heel, prescriptions for opioids like the pain reliever oxycodone became relatively easy to come by. Even after the bone had healed, Ron found a way to make it seem like the pain had returned-over and over again. "They can take an X-ray but they don't know whether it bothers you or not, so I could always keep the pain meds going," he says.

When Ron couldn't get his hands on opioids, he turned to heroin, which had the same narcotic effect and was less expensive and often less of a hassle to obtain. "It was about as easy [to find] drugs as finding your shoe to put on in the morning," he says.

It was during a visit back home in Memphis, after Ron called one of his regular dealers to supply drugs for a party, that he met his wife Carla. They quickly bonded over their shared addiction. "I don't remember [Ron proposing] because I was always medicated," Carla, 61, says today, more than 20 years after they first met.

Like Ron, Carla says she began using drugs in high school, mostly to fit in, and found she loved the way opioids made her feel. "It's a euphoric high, everything is O.K. with the world, and you just feel great," she says. "But as the years went on, the using got more intense, and it got to the point where I had to keep [using] because I was addicted to it, and if I didn't use, I would get sick."

Addiction is at its essence a hijacking. Parts of the brain that are dedicated to rewarding behavior and triggering feelings of satisfaction and calm are kidnapped by opioid drugs to induce a temporary state of ease and even euphoria. "The impulsive, reward-driven system of the brain goes into overdrive," says Dr. Sarah Wakeman, director of the substance-use disorder initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Opioids are particularly adept at such snatching and seizing. The body has its own SWAT team that swoops in when pain erupts: receptors on nearly every cell in the body are primed to sound the alarm when you, say, put your hand on a hot stove or stub your toe. Opioid receptors populate cells not just in the body, but in the brain and spinal cord as well. Their job is to tone down the firing pain signals-the fast breathing, the feeling of panic and the excruciating feeling of ouch!-as quickly as possible. Opioid drugs target these receptors and magnify the body's natural painkilling response. For people with long-term, chronic pain, that can be essential to getting through the day. But the receptors are also intimately networked with the pleasure and reward areas of the brain. They are supposed to counteract the unpleasant feeling of pain with the opposite sensation. The catch is that for people already at risk for addiction, once the brain and body get a taste of the pleasure override, they want more.

Neurologists now know that drugs like opioids can change the brain in people who develop addiction. Once the opioid receptors are activated in these vulnerable brains, they stay activated, becoming the brain's bully, demanding all of the energy and all of the attention. The reward-oriented brain, the regions responsible for impulses and emotions, take precedence over the thinking parts that evaluate things like risk, benefit, consequences and delayed gratification.

And because opioids can release more dopamine, the feel-good sensations triggered by the drug overpower any positive feelings from things like food, love and even sex. "Opioids causes a higher rush of dopamine to the brain that cues the mind to pay attention to that," says Wakeman.

That's how opioid drugs become so addictive; they suppress pain with impressive efficiency, but they also prime neurons to seek and stay in that state of pain-free bliss. "It takes you to a state of nirvana," says Ron. "I can describe it best by saying that if you and your wife are in a house and your wife runs in the room and says, 'I just ran over the dog,' your response is 'We'll get another one.' Nothing matters. Absolutely nothing. There's nothing you can say to me that can get me upset or alarmed. It buries your feelings so deep." In pursuit of that feeling, Ron and Carla took to forging prescriptions. They described their routine as if it were scripted: the pair would visit a hospital and Ron would pose as the patient, signing in with a made up name and Social Security number, and spin a yarn about a toothache. He asked for antibiotics, not painkillers. "That would throw the doctor on easy street, because I'm not in there asking for something for pain, like he generally hears," says Ron.

Eventually, a sympathetic doctor would ask if he were also in pain, and prescribe an opioid. It didn't matter which drug he prescribed, or how many pills. What Ron and Carla really wanted was his DEA number, which is required for filling any prescription medication. While Ron was seeing the doctor, Carla would scope the nurses' station for the other critical part of their scheme: unattended prescription pads.

Carla got pregnant in 1995, and the couple used the doctor's visits as a way to fuel their addiction. While in the hospital, the Hiers managed to steal more prescription pads, before urine and blood tests revealed Carla's opioid abuse.

The hospital called Child Protective Services, but their daughter was born with a congenital heart defect that required her to be airlifted to a specialized children's hospital. After a court case, they say they ultimately gave up custody to a family that adopted their daughter as an infant.

Even being deemed incapable of keeping their child wasn't enough to jolt Ron and Carla to sobriety. "I can't say that I really ever thought that I had a drug problem," says Ron. "Your addiction don't let you think like that. Your addiction wants you to think that, Man, this is fine. You're doing O.K. This is normal; this is the way to live life. You're not doing nothing wrong."

Ron had three children before he married Carla, and while he has reached out to all of them since he became sober, not all of them have welcomed him into their lives. He says that the daughter he had with Carla does not want a relationship with him. And he doesn't blame her. He recalls coming home with his first child to a ransacked house and a warrant stuck to the door for drug possession. When his second child was born, he says he left his wife while she was in labor to visit a strip club across the street from the hospital. He wasn't even aware he had a third child until a teenaged boy called him and told him he was his son and asked to meet. Ron says he gave his son Xanax before sending him back home.

"No decisions that you make on drugs or alcohol are right, none."

Paris Hardee was one of the millions of people who watched the video of Ron and Carla's overdose. It was her birthday, and she was on her way to a celebratory dinner when a relative called to say that her father had been on the news. She Googled the video and saw Ron sprawled across the bus stop. Paris wasn't surprised by what she saw. "I made fun of him like everybody else," she says. "I was like, 'There's Ron's 15 minutes of fame.'"

Paris, 35, is Ron's second child with his first wife. She was raised by Ron's parents when he proved too unreliable. She only remembers her father when he was high, always asking her and his parents for money.

When she was around 8, Paris says Ron was arrested in front of her and her friends. "We lost all of our friends," she says. "Nobody's parents would let us play with them after that and we had to move. That's really hard when you're in the third grade. I lost every friend I had, but I still thought he was a good guy."

Ron's parents worked hard to maintain their granddaughter's perception. They bought and wrapped birthday and Christmas presents for Paris and her sister in their father's name, and never openly discussed his problems. Still, Paris couldn't help but worry about her dad, particularly when he called her from jail. "I was scared for him," she says. "I thought somebody would beat him up, and when I went to bed, I would worry about him a lot."

For a while Paris tried to help. She wrote motivational notes on pieces of paper that she would stick in his wallet, hoping they would remind him to not drink.

"It was like, 'Dad you can do it. I love you, and you're strong.' Just these little pieces of paper that I wanted him to pull out and read," she says.

Her father repaid her by stealing the birthday money and allowance she got from his parents. "He was always going to choose drugs over health, over family, over friendships," Paris says. "He was going to choose drugs no matter what."

Paris cut off contact with her father, keeping him out of her life for 13 years, including her college graduation and her wedding. She started referring to him as Ron rather than Dad.

That changed once she saw the overdose video. She couldn't shake the image of her father splayed across the bench, limp and unconscious. After pushing him out of her mind for more than a decade, she now couldn't stop thinking about the father who had never really been one.

The clip that had aired on the local news contained the number for Addiction Campuses, a for-profit drug-addiction recovery company with four locations around the country. Paris dialed. "I was crying and I said to whoever answered, 'The man who OD'd in Memphis-that's my dad.'"

"Addicts can say anything, addicts are great actors, you know."

On the other end of the line, the dispatcher for Addiction Campuses called Stacy Dodd, director of operations for their facility just over the Tennessee border in Mississippi. A former addict, Dodd saw an opportunity to help Ron and help the center. He offered to bring Ron in for a 30-day treatment program and waive the typical fee, which can run up to $25,000.

Ron may have been at rock bottom, but he wasn't yet ready to look up. Several months before his overdose, Ron was diagnosed with tonsillar cancer. He says he continued to get high during his chemotherapy treatments, which he completed in July 2016, according to his medical records, snorting before and after his appointments.

On the first day of every month, Ron filled a prescription for Xanax that his doctor had written to help with his anxiety. There were nearly four dozen pills left in the bottle, and, he says, on Oct. 3, 2016, after being revived from the overdose that millions witnessed online, he took them all.

"I'd like to have died from the cancer," Ron says. "I was tired. I was sick of living. I got tired of waking up. I got tired of putting my shoes on. I got tired of reaching for my syringe. I got tired of going and getting money for dope, and I knew I just couldn't live without dope." It wasn't a new feeling for Ron. In his wallet, he carried a weathered scrap of paper on which he had scrawled his own obituary. He left the date of his death blank.

Like many recovery and rehabilitation facilities, Turning Point, an Addiction Campuses facility, relies on a combination of medications and behavior therapy to help people overcome their addiction. Medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, involves using another opioid, such as buprenorphine, to gradually withdraw an opioid addict from his dependence on the drugs. Unlike methadone, which is also used to treat opioid addiction, physicians can prescribe it without the need for a rigid clinical program for monitoring the recovering addict. It's less likely to trigger the addiction and reward cycles that morphine and opioid drugs do, but its use is controversial. Law-enforcement officers in particular have been skeptical of buprenorphine's usefulness, worrying that it amounts to replacing one drug for another in an addict's downward spiral.

Many doctors, on the other hand, see MAT as an essential part of stopping the addiction cycle, a way to break the brain's relentless search for more opioids. "The goal of medication is to relieve that mental obsession, the feelings of craving," says Wakeman, who believes MAT is the best way to help addicts on the road to sobriety. "We need to get people stabilized, and restore their brain to normal function so they are able to think normally."

When Ron woke up on his first morning at the center, he wasn't sold on the idea of recovery. "My first thought was to get out of this damn place, and get on back to that boardinghouse," he says. But when the elevator doors opened in the lobby, he saw that the center was coed. "I'm not trying to be funny. That's what my mind actually thought: there were good-looking girls there, so I was not leaving."

However shallow his reason for staying, Ron did. One day turned into two, and eventually he completed the 30-day program. The therapy included learning skills to help him and his fellow addicts divert their urge to act out of emotion, which often leads to reckless and compulsive behavior like drug use that ends up with their harming themselves or others, and instead to adopt skills to control and turn those emotions and urges into positive reactions rather than negative ones.

After a few weeks in jail, Carla was released and called Paris, looking for Ron. Paris told her he was in a recovery program, and Carla, too, reached out and was offered a similar arrangement as Ron, but at the company's facility in Massachusetts. Because they had used together, the center thought they needed to recover separately. "I had to relearn my thinking, I had to relearn my dealings with people and to listen to people," Carla says of entering treatment.

Undoing decades of addiction is an ongoing process. For the first few weeks at the center, Ron was telling the counselors what he thought they wanted to hear. "Addicts can say anything, addicts are great actors, you know," he says.

Across the country, opioid rehabilitation has become a big business-claiming a larger chunk of the $35 billion drug-addiction treatment industry every year.

Recovery facilities typically provide 30-day programs, since that's what insurance plans tend to cover. It's enough time to wash the drugs out of the addicts' system, but often not enough to arm them with the deeper skills they need to confront the forces that drove them to use in the first place. Relapse rates are high-addiction doctors say nearly every addict who enters treatment can expect to relapse.

Some recovery programs exacerbate the problem by treating addiction as an acute problem that can be solved with a one-time solution, rather than an ongoing disease. A rise in such programs has led the FBI to investigate centers that defraud addicts and their insurers, allegedly billing for services that aren't always effective and can set off a cycle of expensive recovery and relapse.

What recovery facilities do provide, however, is a forced period during which opioids are flushed out of the body, and for some, that's enough to expose some hard truths. It was for Ron. After nearly a month of sober living, Ron says he woke up one morning and asked himself two questions: Are you honestly happy? Do you want to kill yourself? "I couldn't answer the first with a yes, because I had an obituary in my freakin' wallet," he says. "But I also realized I honestly no longer wanted to kill myself."

That marked a change for Ron. That's when the skills the counselors were trying to teach him, and the perspective they were hoping he would gain about his life and his relationships, became more than an exercise to fill up the day. Gradually, Ron began to see his life for what it was-a squandered opportunity, a collection of people he hurt and abandoned, a series of delusions. "We're scared to death of being found out," he says of clinging to drugs. "I was most afraid of finding out who I was because I never knew. I was scared to find out. I was scared to find out that I was probably not as tough as I thought I was. I was probably not as handsome as I thought I was. I was probably not as well-liked as I thought I was. I was scared to discover the truth about me."

After a month in treatment, Ron's first phone call came from Paris. She begged him to stay longer, to continue working on his recovery. She knew that 48 years of addiction couldn't be wiped away in a month, so she made him promise to stay.

He promised. It was the first promise he made to anyone that he kept in a long, long time.

"I wouldn't trade any day of recovery that I've had for a day of addiction."

Ron still has that cell phone that rings in the video. He still has the numbers of his "dope boys," the dealers who, with a push of a button, would send him right back to the drug-fueled nirvana that sustained him for nearly half a century. He also has a new cell phone, with new contacts for people who have reached out since he's been in recovery. But he keeps that old phone and its numbers as a reminder. "I don't never want to forget where I came from," he says. "If I forget that, I could go back."

After more than a month at the recovery center, Ron moved into a halfway house. He now shares an apartment with people he met during recovery. There, his new talisman-replacing the 40 oz. bottle of beer that he says was "part of my outfit" for decades-is a blue Alcoholics Anonymous book, filled with his notes in the margins.

Paris, whose phone call may well have saved her father's life, has gradually let him back into her world and introduced him to his grandchildren. Not long ago, Ron texted Paris at 2 a.m., seized with regret. "I just now wept with sorrow having finally realized how much I wouldev [sic] enjoyed loving my children their entire life [sic]," he wrote. He didn't expect an answer, but the next morning, Paris replied. "Don't cry, Dad. I was really awkward until about 27. You didn't miss much. I love you so so much."

She is cautious, however, since he has been high for nearly 50 years and sober for just one. "I am part of his support system but I have boundaries and I have to maintain those boundaries for my self," Paris says.

Ron still considers getting high every once in a while. But now his thinking brain takes over and quells the urge that rises from the deeper, baser brain that is ruled by the mission to feel good at all costs. And that, say addiction experts, is how recovery starts. For all the ways opioids can rewire the brain, it can be reversed when the hijacked pleasure networks are freed from the onslaught of drugs.

Close to the first anniversary of Ron's sobriety, Paris is amazed by his transformation. "I have my father back," she says in a text message. "It is true that my childhood was rough but now I'm blessed with a father who is growing and changing every day. Someone who did not know how to show love to himself or others is now, through God's grace, experiencing and giving love for the first time. That's a miracle!!"

Carla, too, lives on her own, but in an apartment in Massachusetts far from her old haunts. Raised as a Southern Baptist, Carla rediscovered her faith and says she's committed to building a new life. She continues to go to meetings and shares her story of recovery with others who are struggling with addiction. "I don't want to go back to Memphis. A lot of bad memories, a lot of bad things happened there," she says. Ron and Carla talk on the phone and over social media, but they haven't seen each other since their overdose. Both say they realize they are different people now, and that the things that bound them together before are no longer a part of their lives.

Ron is hoping to become a recovery counselor, helping people like himself by his example. "Life shouldn't be taken lightly," he says. "It's a gracious gift meant to enjoy and not be squandered. I've come to the realization that I've wasted mine-you only get one, and I wasted it." It's a hard-won lesson, but one that is helping him to make the most of whatever life he has left. "I wouldn't trade any day of recovery that I've had for a day of addiction since I've sobered up," he says. "The best thing I have now is peace." - With reporting by Paul Moakley/Memphis *

If you or a loved one are seeking help for drug addiction, please contact samhsa.gov for more information

This project was produced in collaboration with Mic

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Time and M ic present Life After Addiction After video of their overdose went viral, a couple got a chance at redemption Story by Alice Park | Photographs by Jeffrey Stockbridge for TIME The video is hard to watch.

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Get Involved

Our coverage of Ebola continues on Goats and Soda, NPR's global health blog.

Project Credits

Written and photographed by John Poole

Audio production: Sami Yenigun

Design and development: Wes Lindamood and Tyler Fisher

Translations: Mohamed Trawally

Additional photography: Tommy Trenchard

Project manager: Becky Lettenberger

Sr. Editors: Kainaz Amaria, Ben de la Cruz and Vikki Valentine

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Our coverage of Ebola continues on Goats and Soda, NPR's global health blog. Project Credits Written and photographed by John Poole Audio production: Sami Yenigun Design and development: Wes Lindamood and Tyler Fisher Translations: Mohamed Trawally Additional photography: Tommy Trenchard Project manager: Becky Lettenberger Sr.

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South Sudan: Shattered Dreams | IRIN Films

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IRIN presents three films on South Sudan, which has been split by a political crisis that has caused widespread violence throughout the country, dividing communities, killing thousands, and causing the displacement of over half a million people.

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Can we cool the risks of an invisible disaster?

Laurie Goering
26 September 2017

When Hurricane Harvey blasted ashore in August, drowning south Texas in a year's worth of rain in just a few days, it left behind an estimated $150 billion in damage to sodden homes and inundated factories, and claimed about 60 lives.

Two weeks later, Hurricane Irma churned into Florida, killing at least 33 people there and causing billions more in damages - as well as brutal loss of life in the Caribbean.

But the storms may not be 2017's deadliest U.S. disaster. Instead, that title may go to a largely unseen killer: rising temperatures.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURE MAP (Source: NASA)

Leo Diaz (L) and Ramon Bermudez (R) sit with friends in Little Havana's Domino Park on a hot day in Miami, September 5, 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Joe Skipper

Nolvia Hernandez walks under an umbrella to hold off the afternoon heat in Miami, September 5, 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Joe Skipper

Silvana Giuffrida stands on the balcony of her condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami, September 5, 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Joe Skipper

Workers Rai Finalet (C) and Eduardo Malde (L) move construction barriers on a hot day in Miami, September 5, 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Joe Skipper

HEAT DAMAGE

INVISIBLE DISASTER

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Laurie Goering, Chris Arsenault, Adriana Brasileiro, Rina Chandran, Kieran Guilbert, Manipadma Jena, Heba Kanso, Sebastien Malo, Megan Rowling, Adela Suliman, Zoe Tabary, Lin Taylor, Thin Lei Win, Astrid Zweynert

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Laurie Goering, Megan Rowling, Ros Russell

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Martyna Starosta, Rina Chandran, Shanshan Chen

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Joe Skipper, Thin Lei Win, Lin Taylor

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Shanshan Chen

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Nicky Milne, Georgina Cooper

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Can we cool the risks of an invisible disaster? Laurie Goering26 September 2017 When Hurricane Harvey blasted ashore in August, drowning south Texas in a year's worth of rain in just a few days, it left behind an estimated $150 billion in damage to sodden homes and inundated factories, and claimed about 60 lives.

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The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

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The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

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The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

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The epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film.

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How Evolve fans took on the festival's drug problem

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How Evolve fans took on the festival's drug problem

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Music festivals in Canada are facing huge challenges when it comes to keeping their patrons safe: everything from sexual assaults to the lethal opioid fentanyl, which is showing up in recreational drugs.

In 2014, five people died at festivals across the country, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. In response to these challenges, festivalgoers have been organizing volunteer-run harm reduction initiatives to keep their beloved annual events safe.

CBC News followed attendees at this year's Evolve music festival, a staple of summertime celebrations in Atlantic Canada, as they encountered a small army of volunteers over four days of festivities in mid- July.

Evolve has had a reputation for rampant drug use for most of its 18-year history. In 2015, a man died after attending the festival from natural causes. Although unrelated to the event, the death thrust the festival and its drug policies into the spotlight. It's been trying to clean up its reputation ever since. Part of that effort was moving the festival to a new site in Beersville, N.B., about 60 km northwest of Moncton, this summer.

On a blazing hot July day, young people in summer attire arrive in Beersville with coolers and tents packed into cars painted with flowers, happy faces and signs wishing everyone a "happy Evolve." Inside the volunteer medic tent, things are quiet.

Adam Mitchell has been a volunteer medic at Evolve for 10 years, and while most people here are looking out for each other, he says he worries about drug dealers getting in "to sell bad drugs to people and make them very ill."

Once festivalgoers have passed the police checkpoint at the end of the dirt road leading to the site and through a private security sweep of their vehicle, it's time to set up their tents and "begin the journey" - a saying many use to describe their Evolve experience.

The first stop is a visit to Josh Watts, 31, an Evolve veteran from Halifax who's been coming to the festival for 14 years. He spends almost the entire festival inside a tent with a yellow and white striped canopy and a sign advertising free drug testing.

Along with artist Zoe Tipney, 30, he's organized 25 volunteers to help man the tent for the four-day event - independently of festival organizers. They have ear plugs, condoms and water to hand out and are armed with testing chemicals that can discern with some certainty whether or not a drug is what the person taking it thinks it is.

A man in his early 20s stops by to test the cocaine he bought for the festival. Turns out, it is, indeed, cocaine and isn't laced with anything else, at least not anything that Watts's test can detect.

"Cocaine. Pure cocaine."

Evolve festival attendee after having his drugs tested

The man says he'll be back to have more drugs tested later. He returns to his tent to snort the drugs as the first of the weekend's 130 acts takes the stage.

Inside the drug testing tent, Watts is joined by other harm-reduction volunteers. One off them is Greg Weins, an addictions counsellor who grew up going to Evolve every summer and flew from Toronto to continue the tradition this year. But this time, he's back to help.

He has been trained to administer naloxone (Narcan), an opiate antidote that can temporarily reverse the effects of an overdose from opioids such as fentanyl. As sunset nears, he sets out to roam the festival's tent city looking for anyone who might have consumed too much. Before the night is over, at least two people at the festival will need naloxone.

On the other side of the main stage, 28-year-old, curly-haired Coco Harris, a self-proclaimed "budding herbalist" from Nova Scotia's south shore, is boiling water for tea inside a dome tent known as the Tea Hive.

The tent, which is lined with blankets and pillows, is intended as a place for festivalgoers to decompress, drink tea and find someone to sit and talk with if they are feeling overwhelmed. According to Harris, the Tea Hive represents the step before the paramedics. It's manned by volunteers all day and night. The only rule: no shoes.

Inside, volunteers are starting to see the first signs of a day spent in the sun. Thirsty festivalgoers wander into the Tea Hive, reacquainting with old friends or introducing themselves to new ones.

"It's so important with everything that's happening these days," says Harris, referring to Canada's opioid crisis. She explains that more and more recreational drugs are being cut with opiates.

"It's getting a little bit scary out there."

Coco Harris, chill tent volunteer

"We know people are doing things, so we want to make sure everyone's safe doing it," says Harris, who spends the summer travelling the festival circuit in Atlantic Canada.
She also carries a naloxone kit, clipped to the side of her dress.

As the night wears on, people wander in, in need of a little hydration or simply someone to sit with. People hold each other and sway inside the Tea Hive.

Two tents over, a team of four paramedics working the night shift in an air-conditioned RV is ready to help if needed.

And there's little doubt they will be needed.
"It's just starting," says Saint John paramedic Chris Wall, 30. "It's only 11 o'clock. These kids haven't even had all their drugs yet."

Outside the door to the Tea Hive, Peter Nicholson, a 23-year-old sustainable engineer technician living in Halifax, and his team of volunteers meet up for a shift patrolling the dance floor looking for evidence of non-consensual sexual conduct. They wear fuzzy cat-ear headbands and call themselves the Consent Kitties.

As night falls and the moon comes out, the DJs unveil a new 360-degree stage - dubbed the Mother Ship - that was built just in time for the opening of the festival, with the final nails hammered and finishing touches completed as crowds were already streaming into the festival grounds.

It's an hour from midnight, and on the grass near the main stage, crowds close in and sing along to Xavier Rudd, a long-haired Australian with a Bob Marley vibe. A couple making out on the ground begins having sex. A nearby security guard walks over and nudges them with his foot.

Nicholson says most of what the kittens do is remind people that "consent is sexy" and "all you have to do is ask."

As the kittens make their way around the festival grounds, they explain what they do and why to the people they encounter. Out in the dance area, they spot a couple grinding up against each other. They don't notice anything that looks non-consensual, so they move on.

The founder of the Consent Kitties is James MacDonald, 29, a property manager. He says he decided to start the group after his friends began complaining that they didn't want to go out to dance clubs anymore because they didn't feel comfortable. MacDonald says Evolve helped give him confidence to be himself as he was growing up, and he wants to make sure it continues to be a place where people feel safe and comfortable.

"They aren't the fun police."

James MacDonald, founder of Consent Kitties

Much of what Macdonald and the other volunteers at the festival do overlaps with the kind of harm-reduction interventions regular police and security personnel carry out. The effect, however, is different when the intervention is coming from a fellow festivalgoer rather than someone in uniform. Volunteers, after all, are just festivalgoers who are taking a sober shift to patrol the grounds.

"Security doesn't always have the bedside manners that you would want dealing with that situation," says Zoey Tipney, whom we met in the drug-testing tent at the start of the night.

Around 1 a.m., Nicholson - who is still on shift as a Consent Kitty - wanders over to the tent city, which is now completely enveloped in darkness, and joins up with other volunteers at the drug-testing tent.

The volunteers might focus on different aspects of the festival experience, but they see themselves as part of one team with one goal: keeping people safe.

Inside the tent, Watts is back from taking a short break, and he's beginning a six-hour overnight shift testing drugs. People have been lining up outside the tent. A whiteboard that hangs out front is regularly updated and lets passersby know at a glance the kind of drugs the testers are finding at the festival.

Watts says he's done about 100 tests in the last four hours, and so far, most of the drugs have turned out to be what they were sold as.

He says a group of girls came by earlier to test some pills that someone gave them for free. The drugs turned out to be what they thought they were: MDMA, also known as ecstasy.

But earlier in the night, tests of some pills sold as MDMA revealed they were, in fact, a type of drug dubbed bath salts, synthetic psychoactive stimulants that can cause hallucinations, agitation, paranoia and feelings of euphoria.

Watts says he also encountered something he's never come across: MDMA that had two other types of drugs in it. Watts wasn't able to tell what the drugs were.

"I told them, I wouldn't take that," Watts says. "I would never encourage anybody to use illegal drugs, even if it's what they thought it was, but in that case, I can definitely tell somebody not to take it, because it's not good."

As Watts settles in for his night shift, the paramedics in the first aid trailer on the other side of the festival grounds are already halfway through theirs. Calls are coming in over the radio. One festivalgoer tripped on a tent pole and broke his collarbone. He tells the paramedics he just got to the festival and doesn't want to go to the hospital. That's fine, they say. They put his arm in a sling and tell him to get the injury X-rayed soon. It's 2 a.m., and that's the worst they've had to deal with so far. But that will change.

Over the next six hours, paramedics will administer two doses of Narcan - in the form of a nasal spray - to two girls who overdosed. They arrange to have them transported to hospital. They say they're not sure whether or not the cause of the overdoses was fentanyl.

Before the four-day festival is over, they will deal with another overdose and send one person to hospital with heat stroke.

As dawn breaks, campers pack up and volunteers gather what's left of their harm-reduction supplies. They've given out more than 300 condoms and 1,000 ear plugs.

RCMP officers seized prescription drugs, cocaine, marijuana and what they believe was crystal meth. They also arrested a 23-year-old man at an entry checkpoint and charged him with possession with the purpose of trafficking what they believe to be crystal meth.

James MacDonald and his volunteers say it was a successful first festival for the Consent Kitties. A highlight for MacDonald was the moment when a male festivalgoer approached one of the kitten-eared volunteers and asked for advice on how to approach someone he wanted to dance with. Macdonald says he's planning to have Consent Kitties at more festivals in the future.

It's an effort applauded by the festival's head of security, Michael Pullen. He says Evolve has a happy vibe, but sometimes, that can mean people let their guard down. He welcomes volunteer efforts but says an official security presence is still needed.

"We have excellent relationships between all these avenues of harm reduction," he says. "That kind of holistic approach to keeping people safe is one that I think this kind of festival needs, and it's something that we're able to provide."
After all, it could have been a lot worse. We'll never know how many overdoses were prevented by the actions of the volunteers.

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From spectators to volunteers: How festivalgoers are taking security into their own hands

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The Evolve music festival has had a reputation for rampant drug use for most of its 18-year history, but this summer, some longtime festivalgoers decided to tackle the problem head on and take harm reduction into their own hands without banning drugs altogether.