“The water comes out of the tap white, and sometimes dark and dirty, with particles in it,” she said.
“Before the hurricane, the water wasn’t like that.
An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesman said there were “no indications that contaminated material left the facility” and infected Arecibo’s drinking water supply during the storm.
But local residents are taking no chances.
His own home was wrecked by the hurricane and he spends much of what little money he has on bottled water.
“There’s no way I’d drink the water here.
All the money that came to Puerto Rico wasn’t properly administered; it should be used to fix the things that need fixing.” Ben Bostick, a water quality expert at Columbia University, recently traveled to Puerto Rico to test water quality near three Superfund sites, including the battery plant.
In the wake of the hurricane, people desperate for water pried open wells at a contaminated site near Dorado but little information has been publicly released on water quality since.
I would say around 20% of the houses we sampled were empty because the people didn’t live in the building due to a lack of a reliable water supply.” The EPA said that virtually all Puerto Ricans supplied by the island’s water authority had “reliable drinking water”.
An EPA spokesman said: “Many will need federal assistance in order to restore reliable uninterrupted power and full system operation.