Pray that all of those in harm’s way will have their needs met by the various rescue teams being assembled.

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” (Rom 12:12 ESV)

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“In the heat and humidity here in the central mountains, Meryanne Aldea fanned her bedridden mother with a piece of cardboard Sunday as the ailing woman lay on her side, relieving a large ulcer in her back.

The 63-year-old mother, Maria Dolores Hernandez, had cotton stuffed in her ears to keep flies out, since her now screenless windows were letting all sorts of bugs in. The gray-haired diabetic woman spoke with her daughter about her worries: that she would run out of prescription drugs, that they were almost out of generator fuel to keep her insulin refrigerated and to run the fans at night. With all the heat, she feared that her ulcer would become infected.

But she worried most about her daughter’s home on the floor above hers, which was destroyed by Hurricane Maria. The shrieking winds had ripped off the zinc roof and the pounding rains had soaked the unprotected rooms below. While the outer concrete walls were mostly intact, everything else was ruined, covered by dirty tree branches, leaves, glass and debris.

Aldea reached out to hold her mother’s hand.

“Relax,” she said. “It’s OK.”

Four days after a major hurricane battered Puerto Rico, leaving the entire island in a communications and power blackout, regions outside San Juan remained disconnected from the rest of the island – and the world….

“We still need some more help. This is clearly a critical disaster in Puerto Rico,” he said Sunday night. “It can’t be minimized and we can’t start overlooking us now that the storm passed, because the danger lurks.”

For federal agencies trying to respond to Maria, the situation in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands is inescapably more challenging than the situations in Texas and Florida after hurricanes Harvey and Irma. It’s difficult to get onto the islands.

The airports and harbors here were severely damaged. That means the islands are more isolated than ever, even as the humanitarian crisis has worsened by the day….

Federal agencies have succeeded in clearing the use of the Port of San Juan for daytime operations, but other ports remain closed pending inspections. Many roads are blocked, inhibiting relief convoys. The Transportation Department has opened five airports in Puerto Rico and two in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but only for military and relief efforts….

In Juncos, scores of homes were destroyed, and thousands of homes sustained damage, Mayor Alfredo Alejandro estimated. Four highways are inaccessible by car, and two bridges were harmed. Roofs of homes all over town are gone, and almost all government buildings were damaged.

Mountains typically brimming with trees and other vegetation are brown and desolate, stripped of all greenery. The mayor of 17 years said he discovered a river he never knew existed in his town, because it was always overgrown with plants. Curved bamboo lining the winding roads were left as bare sticks.

Less than a week ago, Alejandro said, “I had a pretty town.”

“Today I have a desert,” he said.

Puerto Rico’s executive director of emergency management said in an interview that aerial views of destruction in this region looked “more like a tornado than a hurricane.”

But Maria’s destruction in the town was just the beginning. The mayor said Juncos “anxiously” needs diesel, water, hospital equipment and satellite phones for local leadership.

Some local responders in Juncos were forced to clear area streets by hand with machetes, because the town doesn’t have enough chain saws.

Just two gas stations were functioning in the town, and lines stretched for more than half a mile….

One of the town’s two supermarkets was open Sunday, and employees would let in only 10 people at a time to avoid chaos….

When Aldea, 37, and her 5-year-old daughter walked through her shell of a home in Juncos after the hurricane had passed, the child hardly said a word. She scoured her pink room, with pony stickers on its walls, and picked out a couple of soaked dolls and coloring books.

“We don’t have a house anymore,” Aldea explained to her daughter, Darangellie. “We’re going to have to start new with what we have.”

Aldea, who works as a secretary in the mayor’s office, is living with and taking care of her mother in the tiny room downstairs. Darangellie spends most of the days with a relative in town, but at night she sleeps with her mother. The child has asthma and needs to use a daily nebulizer treatment – requiring her mother to turn on their generator at night. They have enough diesel to power the generator for one more day.

She has a half-tank of gas left and can’t set aside the entire day that would be necessary to wait in line for more because she has to care for her daughter and mother. It doesn’t help that driving to town for her job – which usually takes seven minutes – now takes more than a half-hour because of blocked or inaccessible roads.

But Aldea remained calm. More than anything, she is thankful to be alive: “If I don’t stay strong, how can I take care of the two people who depend on me?”

Across town, a second-level three-bedroom apartment was ripped to shreds in the storm, the cooking appliances, kitchen counters and cabinets the only surviving evidence of the wooden structure….

On Sunday, she still hadn’t walked upstairs to see the debris up close. When asked why, she shook her head and cried. “I can’t,” she said….

Aida Sanchez, a member of [local] congregation, said she came to thank God.

“Because despite the circumstances,” she said, “we’re alive.”… (Excerpted from Washington Post , reporting by Samantha Schmidt and Joel Achenbach with contributions from Daniel Cassady in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Ed O’Keefe in Washington.)