On Hurricane Maria Anniversary, Puerto Rico Is Still in Ruins

PUNTA SANTIAGO, P.R. — When it rains, Maritza Cruz Sánchez springs into a well-rehearsed, 30-minute ritual: She climbs a ladder to where her roof used to be and sucks on a hose to siphon puddles from the plastic tarp suspended over her house.

The tarp is held aloft by a few thin wooden posts, which have begun to warp and now seem almost certain to collapse. The temporary contraption that shelters Ms. Cruz and what little she still owns has been in place since March.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave her $6,000 to replace waterlogged belongings, but nothing to help make her house habitable again.

“I am thankful for the little they gave me,” she said, “but thanks for nothing.”

A year ago, on Sept. 20, the deadliest storm to hit Puerto Rico in over 100 years slammed into the island’s southeast coast, just 14 miles south of where Ms. Cruz lives in Punta Santiago. The tourist and fishing town of 5,000 people bore a terrible share of Maria’s initial fury.

Almost 650 houses flooded with water from the sea; others were inundated by an overflowing lake, a river, and two ponds — and also raw sewage. Many homes lost walls and roofs in winds that reached 155 miles per hour when the storm made landfall.

An aerial photo of Punta Santiago’s handwritten, desperate “S.O.S.” plea, taken in the early days after the storm, circulated around the world. When the Puerto Rico government kicked off a recent public relations campaign to highlight a year of recovery, it did it here. A new sign in town reads: “Bienvenidos. #Covertheprogress.”

Times journalists visited 163 homes in two neighborhoods in Punta Santiago to cover what progress had been made in the last 12 months.

They found a community with signs of fresh paint and, in some of the middle-class parts of town, rebuilt rooms and new furniture.

But in neighborhoods where residents live on meager pensions and disability checks, there were gutted kitchens and electrical wires running randomly along unfinished walls. Roofs were covered with plywood or plastic, many near collapse. Some houses still had no running water. A number of families lived in single rooms in unfurnished houses, sleeping on the floor.

Leomida Uniel, 82, the walls of her house stained in black mold that gave her a lung infection, was sitting on her porch, sobbing. Gilberto Díaz and his wife, María Carrión, were bathing and washing dishes with the aid of a neighbor’s hose stuck through a window. Roberto Albino had an inch of water inside his house.

“They did a ‘magnificent job.’ President Trump says so himself,” Ms. Cruz said. “Have him come say that to my face.”

Punta Santiago’s story underscores how, even after years of responding to devastating storms, the federal government struggles to help get people back in functioning homes after a natural disaster. Residents told stories of FEMA claims denied and their appeals frustrated. Federal grants helped a bit but were not nearly enough to pay for repairs.

FEMA’s work in Puerto Rico was the longest sustained domestic airborne food and water mission in the nation’s history. The agency has never distributed more food or installed more generators.

And its effort to get people back in their homes was massive, too: The $1.6 billion the agency allocated for direct emergency home repairs will be one of the largest housing programs the federal government has ever attempted. FEMA spent another $1.4 billion on grants to homeowners to repair or rebuild their homes and help them pay for temporary lodging.

Yet the record in Punta Santiago and elsewhere shows that the federal government failed to take into account the poverty that plagued the island even before the storm. Unlike survivors of hurricanes along the Atlantic Seaboard or the Texas Gulf Coast, many Puerto Ricans were not able to take FEMA’s small assistance grants and couple them with their own resources to make their homes habitable again — they had no savings or credit to fall back on.

Up to a third of all Puerto Ricans do not have bank accounts. Only 15 percent of those who applied for FEMA help had homeowner’s insurance, and 3 percent had flood insurance.

The result is that hundreds of thousands of people across the island are still living in homes in desperate need of repair.

FEMA’s housing help was slow in arriving, plagued by bureaucratic delays and regulations that failed to take into account the hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico who had no clear title to their properties.

Time and again, people asked for help in getting the most basic kinds of repairs — for missing roofs, collapsed walls, dangerous mold, soaked belongings — then waited for months and often did not get enough to even start the process.

Of the 1.1 million households who requested help from FEMA, about 58 percent were denied. Among those who appealed, 75 percent were rejected again. The median grant given to repair homes was $1,800, compared with about $9,127 paid out to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, according to a Times analysis.

All told, FEMA spent nearly twice as much for housing repair grants in Texas as it did in Puerto Rico, though the money went to 51,000 fewer people.

In part, that may be because houses are more expensive to rebuild in Texas. “The cost of repairs, insurance, there are many factors,” said Daniel Llargués, a spokesman for FEMA. “Geographically, demographically, it’s different from one place to another.”

Michael Byrne, FEMA’s federal coordinating officer in Puerto Rico, stressed that federal emergency aid was never intended to restore people’s homes and possessions to their original condition.

“I think it’s important to realize what FEMA’s role is, that is, as far as our system goes, we’re not here to make everybody whole,” Mr. Byrne said. “None of our programs are designed to fix everything that went wrong for individual families, but we are here to give you a leg up.”

More than 3,300 people in Puerto Rico received the agency’s maximum grant of $33,000, Mr. Byrne said. The aid, he said, was paid out along a standard distribution range. “I know you’re going to run into outliers, but it’s just like anything else: it’s a normal bell curve,” he said.

That is not what the data shows. Two-thirds of people in Puerto Rico who got housing repair grants from FEMA received less than $3,000.

In Punta Santiago, FEMA data shows, 746 of the area’s 1,554 homes were so badly damaged they needed emergency repairs in order to be habitable. But only 512 families were eligible for cash grants for their damage. The median grant handed out was $1,812.

A new roof of cheap corrugated zinc typically starts at about $5,000 and might blow off again in the next hurricane; a concrete roof that could survive future storms costs about $15,000. But FEMA payments, by federal law, are based only on what homeowners lost.

FEMA’s damage estimates often seemed to bear no relation to reality, said Héctor M. Pesquera, the secretary of public safety for Puerto Rico. The commonwealth’s government challenged FEMA’s initial wave of assessments, demanding a review because they were so low.

“They would say, ‘You may have damages, but this house is livable,’” Mr. Pesquera said. “And I’m living in it saying, ‘Really? Seriously? Well, look at the hole in the ceiling.’”

Homeowners who did not get enough help from FEMA grants could eventually turn to a $1.6 billion program, funded by FEMA but run by the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, called Tu Hogar Renace — Your Home Reborn. Under that program, teams of contractors were dispatched to complete minor repairs in order to get people back in their homes as soon as possible.

The damage estimates developed under that program came back much higher. In Punta Santiago, where FEMA’s median damage assessment was $1,361, Tu Hogar Renace’s was $10,740.

In fact, it is likely that neither was entirely reliable. Puerto Rico’s estimates included markups for the overhead and management fees for construction companies doing the work, while FEMA’s, based on preset guidelines, did not come anywhere near what people needed.

In any case, the Puerto Rico program did not begin work in earnest until nearly five months after the storm, in February. As of Sept. 13, the program had finished work on 80,700 homes; another 30,000 repairs were either still underway or had not yet started.

Part of the problem, Puerto Rico officials said, was a bureaucracy that delayed decision-making and required local officials to upload millions of pages of documents for invoicing alone.

Dennis González, the deputy secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, said FEMA would schedule a dozen meetings to discuss a project only to change the decision-making teams — and decisions — months later.

“You sit down in October to talk about a spend plan that starts in January. And then you get in January and somebody comes back to you and says, ‘Well, no, that’s not going to be the process, we’re going to do this other process,’” he said. “Now you start performing or doing that process, bringing all the documentation necessary, and comes February, comes March and they change that back to another system.”

Going into the summer, nine months after the hurricane, the percentage of homes that had been repaired was in the single digits, Mr. González said.

In home after home in Punta Santiago, the shortfalls were obvious. People were living with drips, drafts and mold a year after the storm. In a town with a 25 percent unemployment rate, and where more than half of the wage earners make less than $20,000 a year, there was no other option.

Ms. Cruz, 59, said she was among the homeowners who were denied a FEMA grant because they lacked title to their homes, a common problem in Puerto Rico, where property is often passed among family members without paperwork.

She was referred to the Small Business Administration and was turned down again, this time because her income did not meet requirements. Ms. Cruz, who suffers from chronic lung disease, receives about $737 a month in disability benefits and has no other income.

Like many Puerto Ricans, she has no savings. She lost her job in 2012, and her respiratory problems keep her from returning to work. Her car was repossessed a few years ago, and she does not have a credit card.

The tarp on her roof was installed by a nonprofit group out of Washington State, and an anonymous philanthropist gave her and others in town a $1,500 debit card.

Pablo Figueroa, 63, rode out the storm in the house where he has lived his entire life. When the water rose to 10 feet, he fled. He came back the next day to find that water and raw sewage had ruined the downstairs. The upstairs was wrecked, too; the roof was gone. He found fish inside his house.

“It looked like a pool,” said Mr. Figueroa, a retired carpenter who lives alone.

Just a few days after the storm, Mr. Figueroa said he spent a full day waiting in line at a FEMA service center. Homeowners had to bring their own food and water, he said, or go a whole day without eating.

“They had me make a summary of everything that was lost,” he said. “So I made a list, of everything.”

Mr. Figueroa does not recall how long he waited for someone to come check out his damage, but FEMA’s own report shows the average wait was 39 days, far longer than the agency’s response time after most big storms. The agency added inspectors, but they kept getting lost on their way to people’s homes, many of which lacked formal addresses, a FEMA official said.

On the mainland, an inspector might do a dozen inspections a day. In Puerto Rico, they did about four.

“We’re going to find a better way to do housing inspections,” Mr. Byrne said.

Mr. Figueroa received $6,000 in the fall for his personal belongings, but after buying a refrigerator and a few other things, the rest went fast. He said he did not receive a response about replacing the roof, so he went back in October or November.

This time, he learned his lesson and got there by 5 a.m. to beat the crowds. He found up to 400 people already waiting; they had arrived the night before.

A friendly woman there told him he had not received a grant to repair the roof because he lacked the title to his home, which he inherited. The rules were later changed, allowing people to submit a sworn statement instead, but Mr. Figueroa is unclear about whether he ever sent one.

He also applied for help to Tu Hogar Renace for direct repairs, but never heard back. A local nonprofit also promised help, but it never arrived.

For now, he is living in the downstairs part of his house, because with parts of the upstairs still covered only with a tarp, it still gets wet. He sleeps in a corner that does not drip.

“I appealed so many times,” he said. “I am still waiting.”

Mr. Figueroa and others living in limbo may get help from a $20 billion allocation headed Puerto Rico’s way from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. FEMA also has a program to directly rebuild homes that are too damaged to repair. The agency set aside $462 million to do the work, but a year after the storm, only 12 homes are under construction.

Mr. Pesquera, the public safety secretary, said anyone flying into Puerto Rico can look out the airplane window and see the patchwork of blue tarps covering homes, installed as temporary protection from the elements. There are still at least 60,000 of them, he said. Permanent replacements are just what they were a year ago: pending.

“I got issues with that,” Mr. Pesquera said. “Why hasn’t it been done?”