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 Cruz and what little she still owns has been in place since March.

“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 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 mph when the storm made landfall.

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.”

For two weeks in August, The New York Times did just that. A team of journalists went to Punta Santiago to find out what had been done in 12 months. Photographers visited 163 homes in two neighborhoods.

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.

“They did a ‘magnificent job.’ President Trump says so himself,” 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.

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.

— Relief That Fell Short

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 people 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,” 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, 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.

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.

People 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Frances Robles and Jugal K. Patel © 2018 The New York Times