(Photo via Twitter)

Al Shaw

Let’s turn again to the devastating flooding in Houston. One of the more fascinating things about Houston is its capacity for preparing for — and reacting to — massive floods. The city is built on swampland between meandering rivers and marshes that lead to the Gulf of Mexico to drain.

The key word there being “built,” or so says Al Shaw, a News Aps Developer for ProPublica. He created interactive maps to visualize the series, Hell and High Water, a series which ran in ProPublica in 2016, and chronicled the massive flood risks Houston and its surrounding communities could face, of course not knowing at the time Harvey would develop a year later.

He’s here to explain the way Houston infrastructure works and how it's adding to multiple, compound problems they are being hit with right now in what he calls “an insane storm.”