Of all the things that were obliterated when Hurricane Maria crunched into Puerto Rico in September last year, trust may end up being the hardest to repair.

Residents of the US territory are openly disdainful of the efforts of government, from Donald Trump downwards, to provide the basics of disaster relief, to correctly count the dead and even to express concern over their continuing plight. This breakdown in trust now extends to the island’s drinking water.

Marta Rivera, who lives in the city of Arecibo, on the northern coast of the island, had her house completely destroyed by Maria and is battling cancer. She blames her illness on water contaminated by the hurricane.

“The water comes out of the tap white, and sometimes dark and dirty, with particles in it,” she said. “Before the hurricane, the water wasn’t like that. My house was full of water; it smelled really bad. Me, my son, my aunt and even the doctor here have got sick in some way. It’s made me a little paranoid. Traumatized.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marta Rivera. Her home, in the background, was flooded during Hurricane Maria. Photograph: Angel Valentin/The Guardian

Arecibo sits next to a former battery processing facility – a hulking, rusting complex where batteries were dissolved in acid. It became a Superfund site in the summer of 2017, allowing for federal intervention to clean it up. Shortly afterwards, the hurricane swept over it.

An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesman said there were “no indications that contaminated material left the facility” and infected Arecibo’s drinking water supply during the storm. But local residents are taking no chances. Much like in Flint, Michigan – where local officials declared the water safe more than a year ago – people aren’t taking assurances on face value.

Alberto Escobar now lives in a simple brick home with his daughter, son-in-law and Galito, a macaw that has learned an impressive array of swear words. His own home was wrecked by the hurricane and he spends much of what little money he has on bottled water.

“I get it from Walmart,” he said. “There’s no way I’d drink the water here. To shower, yes. All the money that came to Puerto Rico wasn’t properly administered; it should be used to fix the things that need fixing.”

Ben Bostick, a water quality expert at Columbia University, recently traveled to Puerto Rico to test water quality near three Superfund sites, including the battery plant. In the wake of the hurricane, people desperate for water pried open wells at a contaminated site near Dorado but little information has been publicly released on water quality since.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Bostick tests water collected in the northern town of Arecibo. Photograph: Angel Valentin/The Guardian

Bostick took more than 100 samples from residents, as well as a few streams and other waterways. Concerned that the water was tainted from industrial pollutants whipped up by the hurricane, he tested for metals such as lead, arsenic and uranium. The results were encouraging – pollution levels were “surprisingly low”, he said.

Bostick did, however, find widespread distrust of the water supply, as well as chronic problems with supply reliability.

“If you are of any means here, you don’t drink the water, you buy it in bottles,” he said. “Many people we had had issues with water supply and this uncertainty spilled over into all aspects of water; people start to doubt its quality.

“Water is such a fundamental requirement for our lives that lacking it makes a house unlivable. I would say around 20% of the houses we sampled were empty because the people didn’t live in the building due to a lack of a reliable water supply.”

The EPA said that virtually all Puerto Ricans supplied by the island’s water authority had “reliable drinking water”. But for the 3% of the population in remote areas not served by the water authority, consistent water supply problems still exist, 10 months after the hurricane.

An EPA spokesman said: “Many will need federal assistance in order to restore reliable uninterrupted power and full system operation. It is our intent to continue pursuing the full repair and restoration of all systems that are struggling to provide consistent and reliable drinking water.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Benjamin Bostick and Alondra Cruz Portillo test water collected in Arecibo. Photograph: Angel Valentin/The Guardian

An assessment of 237 small, independent water systems in Puerto Rico, serving around 89,100 people, found nearly half “suffered from a significant deterioration in operational capacity several months after the storm, in some cases leading to a total inability to deliver water to residents”, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Some water systems still have damage to water pipes, wells and distribution lines. Others have reported damage to chlorination systems used to treat water for bacterial contamination.

These problems, along with broader wariness of how federal and territory government has handled the hurricane’s aftermath, will ensure many Puerto Ricans continue to spend a large slice of their income on bottled water.

“There’s a lack of public trust and the money spent on bottled water is a real impediment to people,” said Bostick.