SAN JUAN, P.R. — The Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport is normally a bustling and happy place, full of vacationers and warm family reunions.

Since Hurricane Maria, however, the airport, the Caribbean’s busiest, has been a place of concentrated anxiety, with limited power and services and no air-conditioning. The flights out have been scarce, if they have not been canceled. For those with a golden ticket to the United States mainland, getting beyond airport security has felt like entering a place of refuge — far from looting, long gas lines and worries about getting another meal.

On Tuesday afternoon, about two dozen people were camped in front of the ticket counters, dejected, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard boxes and wondering when they could get on a plane.

Aracelis Vergara, 48, was huddled with her three teenage daughters. “I tried to get out since Monday,” she said, first by trying the smaller airport in the southern city of Ponce. It was closed. “They basically laughed in our faces,” she said of the employees there.