In Puerto Rico mountains, more than muddy roads delay relief efforts

If it weren’t for her daughter, Silvia Maldonado is not sure how she could have made it.

Living through the two back-to-back hurricanes that brought life to a standstill in her mountain-nestled settlement of 300 residents was bad enough.

But it’s the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria that has the tidy elderly woman feeling overwhelmed: a month and counting of initially damaged services, and then the knock-out of no electricity, no water, and, she says, no sign of help from the civilian and military authorities buzzing around the flood-bashed streets and mud-caked roads of Utuado, a central Puerto Rican municipality of 35,000 people.

“We feel forgotten,” says Mrs. Maldonado, begging pardon for weeping as she revisits what is now simply referred to across Puerto Rico as “la situacion.”

“My daughter was able to fill some jugs of water for me today,” she adds, “but no, we don’t see help coming for the people in Mula,” the Utuado village she calls home.

Such sentiments of abandonment are frustrating for the