More than three weeks since Hurricane Maria, more than a third of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to drinking water. So some are turning to wells at Superfund sites on the island—areas designated the most toxic in US territory.
The EPA says it is assessing “Superfund sites, oil sites, and chemical facilities” inundated by the storm. The agency also warned that no one should drink water from rivers or streams unless it can be boiled for longer than one minute. With 60 percent of wastewater-treatment plants out of service, “raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored,” the EPA wrote.
The same day as the EPA’s email, president Donald Trump tweeted that the the US “cannot keep FEMA…in P.R. forever!

Puerto Ricans are reportedly being given drinking water from Superfund sites, areas that may be contaminated with hazardous waste, amid an ongoing lack of accessible clean water after Hurricane Maria.
"I don’t have a choice… This is the only option I have," local Jose Luis Rodriguez, 66, told CNN, as he filled up bottles of water at the Dorado Superfund site.
It’s unknown if the particular well being used on Friday is contaminated. The EPA did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News’s request for comment, but said in a statement to CNN that it plans to test the well over the weekend.
Hye-Jin Kim, who works in policy at think tank Frontier Group, created a map of the island’s Superfund sites.
If boiling the water is not possible, water may be disinfected with bleach.

Dorado, Puerto Rico (CNN)Jose Luis Rodriguez waited in line Friday to fill plastic jugs in the back of his pickup truck with water for drinking, doing the dishes and bathing.
But there is something about this water Rodriguez didn’t know: It was being pumped to him by water authorities from a federally designated hazardous-waste site, CNN learned after reviewing Superfund documents and interviewing federal and local officials.
Friday afternoon, CNN watched workers from the Puerto Rican water utility, Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, or AAA, distribute water from a well at the Dorado Groundwater Contamination Site, which was listed in 2016 as part of the federal Superfund program for hazardous waste cleanup.
In announcing the addition of the Dorado site to the Superfund program, the US Environmental Protection Agency says the area was polluted with industrial chemicals, including tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, which "can have serious health impacts including damage to the liver and increasing the risk of cancer," according to the EPA.
It’s unclear whether there are public health risks from this particular well, however.
"While some of these wells are sometimes used to provide drinking water, the EPA is concerned that people could be drinking water that may be contaminated, depending on the well.
Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, the water authority, was unaware that this well site was part of the Superfund program until CNN provided maps showing that this was the case, according to Luis Melendez, sub-director for environmental compliance at the utility.
In 2015, this well in Dorado, which is located near a shopping center, was found by the EPA to be safely within federal standards for PCE and chloroform, two industrial chemicals.
"I’ve never seen this before," he said, referring to the idea a Superfund site would be used as a source of public drinking water.
People waiting in line for water on Friday were largely unaware of these concerns.

Houston’s polluted Superfund sites threaten to contaminate floodwaters.
The Brio Refining toxic Superfund site, where ethylbenzene, chlorinated hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds were once pooled in pits before the Environmental Protection Agency removed them, sits “just up the road, and it drains into our watershed,” he said.
Harris County, home to Houston, has at least a dozen federal Superfund sites, more than any county in Texas.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Texas commission, Brian McGovern, wrote in an email that its workers “took steps to secure state sites in the projected path of Hurricane Harvey” by removing drums with chemical wastes and shutting down systems.
But Highfield and a colleague at Texas A&M, Samuel Brody, want to know what’s in the water now, as residents with children sometimes plunge into it as they wade to safety from flooded homes.
We can’t say for sure it will happen, but it’s certainly a possibility.” Residents who use well water are especially vulnerable, Loeb said: “There’s no testing of their water to know whether it’s been contaminated.” In addition to the toxic pits at the Brio in Houston’s Friendswood community, Harris County’s polluted Superfund sites include the low-lying San Jacinto River Waste Pits that “is subject to flooding from storm surges generated by both tropical storms (i.e. hurricanes) and extra tropical storms” that push water inward from Galveston Bay, according to an Army Corps of Engineers report released last year.
“When you get water in your home, it’s not just water, it’s sediment and debris.
Once you get water in the home and it has to be cleaned out, people are exposed.” Both Brody and Highfield said Monday that they were fortunate: Water had not entered their houses.
I plotted a path earlier thinking I could get kind of a back road path where I thought the water would be lower at the creek.” But it was no use.
His car was no match for what is by far the worst flooding ever in a city that has flooded since the month it was first founded.