“But water?
Water is everything.” Petra Gonzalez uses bottles of water to wash dishes in a sink that hangs outside her makeshift house after Maria destroyed the home she shared with her husband for 63 years.
In the year since Maria, 50 percent of Puerto Ricans say people in their households could not get enough water to drink, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
More than 230 of these rural neighborhoods across Puerto Rico subsist on their own wells or natural springs.
LEFT: Granddaughter Marta Fernandez looks out the window of her home, the only one in the family compound that was not destroyed.
‘It broke my soul’ Carlos Fernandez and Petra Gonzalez lived in the same pink, wooden house for 63 years.
For days after the storm, Fernandez refused to leave his battered home.
‘I searched and searched’ As Hurricane Maria swept through their mountains, Fernandez and Gonzalez waited out the storm at their nephew’s concrete house.
Most important, the pouch carried a silver ring, engraved with the name of his son — Tony.
‘Llegó el agua’ After finishing lunch, Gonzalez tried turning on the kitchen faucet to wash the dishes piled up in the sink.