The morning after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, Sofia Maldonado tried to call her parents, who were still on the island. “You call them, call them, and no answer,” she says. She switched to texts. Still nothing. “Not having communications with your parents or your friends or anyone, it’s very hard because you don’t know how they’re doing.”

Maldonado, an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was traveling when the hurricane hit. She watched the destruction unfold on television from her friend’s apartment in New York. The Category 4 storm splintered wooden homes, destroyed most of the power lines, and killed dozens of people. Satellite photos show only darkness where there was once a web of lights. “It’s as if Puerto Rico doesn’t exist,” Maldonado says.

“It’s as if Puerto Rico doesn’t exist.”

Now, more than a week later, filthy, stagnant floodwaters still blanket the streets. The island remains almost entirely without electricity, and nearly half of the 3.4 million US citizens who live there don’t have fresh water. Food and fuel supplies are scarce, and two people on life support have died because a hospital’s generator ran out of diesel. The island’s communications infrastructure was also badly damaged, leaving Puerto Rico eerily cut off from the rest of the world. The widespread power outage knocked out almost all cable service and telephone lines, according to the latest update from the Federal Communications Commission. And more than 90 percent of the island’s cellphone towers are still out of service.

The wrecked communication infrastructure is stalling recovery efforts, keeping people both on and off the island in the dark about the worst of the hurricane’s destruction. Emergency personnel have finally managed to reach all 78 of Puerto Rico’s municipalities, a FEMA spokesperson told The Verge. (Six were still out of contact as of Monday.) Because roads are damaged and drivers and dispatchers can’t coordinate their efforts, thousands of pounds of emergency supplies are stuck at the ports.

Communication after a disaster of this scale isn’t just a matter of convenience; it’s life and death. With temperatures climbing over 90 degrees, no refrigeration for food or medication, and no water, more people will die, especially those who are older, injured, sick, differently abled, or alone — especially if they have no way to call for help.

Maddening.

3,000 shipping containers packed with food water & medicene have been sitting at the port in Puerto Rico since Saturday pic.twitter.com/LJ0ETpmnOf — David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) September 27, 2017

To start filling the communications gap, FEMA is sending satellite phones. Roughly 120 arrived on the island on Tuesday, nearly a week after the hurricane struck. The National Guard reports that five massive, generator-operated military communications units called Joint Incident Site Communications Capability (JISCC) systems are already on the ground. These can bridge calls from civilian and military radios and cellphones, a National Guard spokesperson says in an email, “so civilian first responders can better coordinate with their military support.”

“We can be of service to other Americans far away.”

Local amateur (or ham) radio operators whose antennas survived the storm have pitched in as well, says Tom Gallagher, CEO of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association of radio amateurs. Hams can talk, send data or text, or use Morse code to communicate with each other on specific radio frequency bands. With the power out, the police and emergency radio systems went down. “So now the police are riding with ham radio operators with VHF handheld units — handy talkies,” Gallagher says. Others are working with Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority to dispatch trucks for repairs and fuel deliveries.

More amateur radio operators have recently arrived as well. Recruited by the American Red Cross, 20 ham operators will help add the names of hurricane survivors to its Safe and Well website, which friends and families can search for news about loved ones. Three radio operators are continuing on to the US Virgin Islands, which were also decimated by this season’s back-to-back hurricanes. “It is incredibly gratifying to see that we can be of service to other Americans far away,” Gallagher says. “We were flattered that the Red Cross called us, for the first time. We’re proud of the hams that stepped up and volunteered.”

Devices communicating over mesh networks could be another amateur fix, but they face a few obstacles. Mesh networks usually require Wi-Fi routers, which need power — something Puerto Rico doesn’t have right now. They're also far more limited in scope than traditional internet and phone service. Without a connection to the larger internet, mesh networks would only reach as far as the nearest router's signal, making it hard to coordinate large-scale services. Even so, the startup goTenna is sending several hundred antennas that pair with mobile devices. These could allow first responders to create a type of mesh network in order to send texts and GPS coordinates via radio waves over longer distances than a walkie-talkie.

Improvements to emergency communications on the island are painting a “clearer picture of the extent of the storm damage and the magnitude of the response challenge,” the Department of Defense reported on Wednesday. The dire scene prompted the DOD to scale up relief efforts, says the report — which is dated a full week after the hurricane.

“Telecom and power infrastructure was virtually destroyed.”

Until the telecommunications providers that serve Puerto Rico repair and restore power to the damaged cell towers, people who need to call for help, or who want to check in with friends and family are still largely out of luck. “Telecom and power infrastructure was virtually destroyed,” a T-Mobile spokesperson told The Verge in an email. That includes downed cell towers and severed internet cables, the spokesperson confirmed: “Even submarine cables to the mainland were damaged.” (An AT&T representative couldn’t confirm a submarine cable had been damaged.)

Both AT&T and T-Mobile report that they’ve deployed people, supplies, and generators to fix damaged telecommunications equipment. An AT&T spokesperson says the company has plans to send in temporary cell towers, which are basically satellite dishes on trucks.

“Repairs are ongoing but in full transparency, it’s been very, very difficult,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said in an email. “We can’t get to many sites to make repairs; security is a very serious issue on the island and is causing delays for all telecommunications companies; the power is still out on almost the entire island; there are fuel and water shortages, which will delay repairs even more.” Open Mobile, a wireless provider in Puerto Rico, has reported thefts of the diesel that fuels the generators powering its cellular antennas, according to a Facebook post. (The post is written in Spanish, and was translated by Vox Media designer Marvin Cespedes. Open Mobile did not respond to inquiries via phone, email, or Facebook.)

Longer term, preventing a similar catastrophe from happening again will require a much bigger investment in Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, says Greta Byrum, director of the resilient communities program at the public policy institute New America. “There’s a whole social catastrophe that led to this point. It’s not like what happened in Puerto Rico happened in a void,” Byrum says. “This was a place that’s been systematically underinvested, and the telecommunications industry only invests in places where it knows it will make money.”

Democratic FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel says that the FCC will need to learn what about its disaster response worked, and what didn't to improve industry regulations. "It’s crazy that the FCC won’t commit to this course," she said in an emailed statement. "We have battered infrastructure and communications systems that need repair. We have a humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico. It’s time for leadership.”

“The worst thing is the feeling that it’s not getting better.”

Cell service has slowly started to return to San Juan, at least, and people there have had to pull together to communicate with the outside world. Getting word to and from other parts of the island, however, is still impossible. Pablo Rodriguez, who owns several bars in San Juan, spoke with me on his cellphone as he walked home from the gas station. He’d left his car with a friend to wait in line for fuel — a process that, since the hurricane, has taken hours, even days. “The worst thing is the feeling that it’s not getting better,” Rodriguez said. “People get confused, and everyone is starting to get nervous when you don’t see any progress.”

Something he has noticed improving, at least a little bit, is cell coverage in the city. Talking and walking had been impossible just two days earlier. Still, he said, “A lot of people are driving looking for signal, and they stop in the middle of the highway to talk and connect with their families.” He doesn’t have to do that: he discovered that next to the broken awning on his roof, there’s cellphone service. He used it to post a note on Facebook: “Finally have some connection. We are safe.”

San Juan-based broadband provider Optico Fiber weathered the storm mostly intact. Two days after Hurricane Maria hit, it opened up a Wi-Fi hot spot at its corporate headquarters. More than 3,000 devices connected to it on Sunday alone. “People are sitting side by side on the sidewalk, on the curb, on our stairs — wherever they can,” Optico Fiber spokesperson Karen Larson told The Verge in an email. Police are helping manage the massive influx of traffic nearby. “The atmosphere is one of calm and relief. There has been no violence or conflicts, rather love and support for each other.”

For Maldonado, word from back home reached her in digital bits and pieces, including social media posts and texts from people whose cellphones still had service. But days went by without news about her parents, who live in the historic section of San Juan. She asked a neighbor via Instagram to check on her folks, but he’s in a similar predicament: marooned in Argentina, far way from home as the crisis unfolds.

“Things are not easy, and they’re not going to get easier.”

He started a group text, and eventually, someone sent back a picture of Maldonado’s smiling parents. Their first conversation was over a landline. She remembers her mom saying, “I’m glad you’re in New York because things are not easy, and they’re not going to get easier anytime soon.” But even as the catastrophe worsens, she still can’t call her parents to make sure they’re safe and that they have enough food and water. She has to wait for them to drive to a small airport nearby that has Wi-Fi. So she won’t miss a call, she’s turned the volume on her ringer all the way up.

In between check-ins, she reassures herself that her parents’ social network — their real-world friends and neighbors — will look out for one another. But not everyone is so lucky. For those who are sick, elderly, differently abled, or living in remote areas, a functioning phone is a lifeline. In most of Puerto Rico, those lifesaving phones still aren’t working. “We’re connected by this piece of technology,” Maldonado says. “We think that the phone is our everything nowadays. And it could stop working, so easily.”