SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — (SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico) -- Some Puerto Ricans are worried about the safety of their drinking water.
Over the last few decades, some residents and advocates on the island have become skeptical about the water that comes out of their faucet, deciding to drink only bottled water.
Puerto Rico also does not get the same amount of resources allocated to other jurisdictions in the U.S. and budget cuts have been made to all government agencies on the island, including environmental quality and protection agencies, Ruth Santiago, an attorney and environmental health advocate with Earth Justice, told ABC News.
The landfill, where many hazardous wastes were disposed of from the 1970s to the 1990s, has been established as a superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and has been monitored for 30 years, Carmen Guerrero Perez, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Caribbean Environmental Protection Division, told ABC News.
While Perez said the EPA has"a number of different enforcement strategies," enforcements are akin to"a slap on the wrist," Santiago said."Puerto Rico cannot continue to be the place where the U.S. extracts wealth and harms people because that's just wrong," Varona said.
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