A devastating drought consumed nearly all of Texas in 2011, killing livestock, destroying agriculture and sparking fires that burned thousands of homes. It was the worst single-year drought in the state's recorded history.

As part of NPR's state-based public policy reporting network, StateImpact, we created an interactive news application to show how state policy (and in this case, climate forces) have affected people's lives.

The interactive is broken up into four buckets: the his­tory and the drought's pro­gres­sion, the impact and dev­as­ta­tion, the pol­icy choices and their lim­i­ta­tions, and the Tex­ans, who we hope will tell us their stories.