UTUADO, Puerto Rico _ On the side of the highway, cars whizzed by as the poor filled plastic bottles and paint buckets with water flowing out of the mountain.
Nearly six weeks after Hurricane Maria, they still had no running water and nowhere else to bathe or wash clothes. Some _ from remote areas where bottled water was too expensive or difficult to obtain _ also didn't have anything else to drink.
And everyone was worried about getting sick.
"We're drinking water from wherever we can get it, because the water doesn't come," said Jose Luis Gambo Rodriguez as he helped his mother and stepfather wash clothes. "The government says there's (purified) water, but it's not here."
For Gambo Rodriguez's family and thousands of others, the lack of clean water is posing a serious health concern.
Since the hurricane hit, there have been at least 18 confirmed cases of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease spread through contact with contaminated water that can be deadly if not quickly treated. At least four people have died from the disease so far, according to official figures. It's likely both numbers could be higher because they don't reflect other suspected but unconfirmed cases in remote areas.
Doctors and nurses also report seeing patients for other health problems related to a lack of clean water, including gastrointestinal illnesses and pink eye.
Although government officials say they've distributed water purification tablets and bottled water throughout the island, by late October there were still places where residents said the help hadn't arrived.
The mountainous area outside Utuado in central Puerto Rico was one of those places. Gambo Rodriguez and his family said they hadn't gotten any bottled water or purification tablets from the government and couldn't afford to buy their own.
Two weeks after the hurricane, Gambo Rodriguez's stepfather started vomiting and came down with a fever. Wilfredo Cosme de Jesus went to a local hospital, where he said the doctor diagnosed him with leptospirosis. After treating Cosme de Jesus with antibiotics, the doctor cautioned him not to use unpurified water.
But a week after he was released from the hospital, Cosme de Jesus was bathing and helping his wife wash clothes on the side of the road. His wife had also started to feel ill.
As she wrung out the laundry over a metal basin, Maria Rodriguez Rivera said she had come down with similar symptoms. "I feel sick with a headache and fever," she said.
