Majority of Claimants in Puerto Rico Still Await for Assistance From FEMA, Many Found ‘Ineligible’

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Armando Vega Martínez anxiously awaits for the day he can have a home again. The house in which he lived, among the mountains of the Guaraguao neighborhood in Ponce, was completely destroyed when an adjacent structure fell on it after succumbing to the powerful winds of hurricane María just over four months ago. To find a new home, the 69-year-old man has $13,000 that was recently awarded to him by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to which he appealed for aid the same way as roughly one million people have done. “With that, nowadays you can’t even have two ‘zocos’ [or house pillars],” Vega Martínez assured, still struggling to verbalize what he experienced that September 20. “We have gone through hell.