MONTEBELLO, Puerto Rico — Relatives helped Maribel Valentin Espino find shelter when Hurricane Maria roared through her community in northern Puerto Rico. Neighbors formed volunteer brigades to cut fallen trees and clear twisty mountain roads after the storm had passed. Now, friends and a local cattle ranch provide the water they need to survive in the tropical heat.
Valentin and her husband say they have not seen anyone from the Puerto Rican government, much less the Federal Emergency Management Agency, since the storm tore up the island Sept. 20, killing at least 16 people and leaving nearly all 3.4 million people in Puerto Rico without power and most without water.
‘‘People say FEMA is going to help us,’’ Valentin said Tuesday as she showed Associated Press journalists around the sodden wreckage of her home. ‘‘We’re waiting.’’
Many others are also waiting for help from anyone from the federal or Puerto Rican government. But the scope of the devastation is so broad, and the relief effort so concentrated in San Juan, that many people from outside the capital say they have received little to no help.
Valentin, her husband, and teenage son live in one such area, Montebello, a 20-minute drive into what used to be lushly forested mountains near the northern coastal municipality of Manati. Hurricane Maria’s Category 4 winds stripped the trees bare and scattered them like matchsticks. ‘‘It seemed like a monster,’’ she recalled.
The roads are passable now but the community is still isolated. ‘‘Nobody has visited, not from the government, not from the city, no one,’’ said Antonio Velez, a 64-year-old who has lived there his entire life.
Meanwhile, under pressure to do more to help Puerto Rico, President Trump said Wednesday his administration was considering waiving a little-known federal law that prohibits foreign-flagged ships from shuttling goods between US ports.
Republicans and Democrats have pushed Trump to waive the Jones Act, saying it could help get desperately needed supplies delivered to the island more quickly and at less cost.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke waived the law earlier this month to help ease fuel shortages in the Southeast following hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
That order included Puerto Rico, but expired last week shortly after Hurricane Maria struck.
The Trump administration has said a waiver is not needed this time, because there are enough US flagged ships available to ferry goods to Puerto Rico. Officials at the Homeland Security Department, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue, said the bottleneck is with unloading cargo at the island’s damaged ports and getting the supplies inland. They made the remarks in a background conference call with reporters to justify the administration’s decision.
Asked about that decision as he left the White House to pitch his tax plan at an event in Indiana, however, Trump suggested he may be open to changing course. He said some US shipping executives opposed a temporary waiver.
‘‘Well, we’re thinking about that,’’ the president said. ‘‘But we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people and a lot of people who work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted. And we have a lot of ships out there right now.’’
Republicans and Democrats were pressing the issue. Even before the storm hit, shipping household and commercial goods to Puerto Rico cost roughly double what it did to nearby Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, where foreign vessels are free to dock. The US Virgin Islands were granted a permanent legal waiver from the Jones Act by Congress, but not Puerto Rico.
‘‘These emergency waivers have been valuable to speed up recovery efforts in the impacted regions,’’ Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said Tuesday. ‘‘It is unacceptable to force the people of Puerto Rico to pay at least twice as much for food, clean drinking water, supplies, and infrastructure due to Jones Act requirements as they work to recover from this disaster.’’
Representative Nydia Velázquez, a New York Democrat who was born in Puerto Rico, also urged Trump to approve a waiver.
‘‘Puerto Ricans are without food, clean water, and electricity,’’ she said. ‘‘We must use every tool at our disposal to channel assistance to the island.’’
The American Maritime Partnership, which represents more than 400 US shipping companies, said a Jones Act waiver would hinder relief efforts.
Waiving restrictions on foreign vessels that carry cargo to Puerto Rico ‘‘could overwhelm the system, creating unnecessary backlogs and causing confusion on the distribution of critical supplies throughout the island,’’’ said Thomas Allegretti, the group’s chairman.
There are several thousand US federal employees in Puerto Rico helping with the recovery effort. They are most visible in San Juan.
