A year after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is still facing pressing issues today. The storm has left constant reconstruction throughout the island and eleven thousand people are still without power.The water system was harmed so clean water was extremely difficult to find. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave out bottles of water to families, but recently there has been a discovery of twenty thousand pallets of bottled water in a unused runway from where FEMA had dropped it off. This meaning, it was never actually given out to the people. Federal officials used that area as a staging ground to collect the containers of water coming in. The water sat there untouched for so long, people were still getting spring water from hillside mountains in the jungles of Puerto Rico.

Perhaps the water was left after poor communication of what to do, who knows? But after a while the water being distributed by FEMA had been getting complaints of the taste and smell of the water. The Mayor of Ceiba, Puerto Rico,  Angel Cruz Ramos was grateful for the water but he believes that too much was delivered at the wrong time. “The time and heat has made it bad”, he added.

Puerto Rico now says 2,975 people have died from Hurricane Maria’. But they are still working hard to rebuild and make Puerto Rico better and back to the way it was before the hurricane.