Taina Gomez saw no other option.

Over a month ago, she lost everything to Hurricane Maria. Her house near the beach in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was completely destroyed. Also gone was the hospital where she received treatment for a problem with her colon.

“I had to come here to have a better chance to live,” Gomez, 37, said in Spanish. “Until Puerto Rico recovers, you can’t be there if you have a medical condition. There’s nothing — no doctor, no way to communicate, nothing — it’s completely devastated.”

Family in Philadelphia took her in, but they didn’t have room for her 18-year-old daughter. She was sent to live with her father in Florida.

“I lost it all, all,” Gomez said. “Starting from zero — it’s hard.”

In the weeks since Maria devastated the U.S. territory, thousands of Puerto Ricans had been forced out of the island. With no power, no water, no medical assistance, no school, and no jobs, many see no other choice but to leave. And many of them are coming to Philadelphia, home to the fifth largest Puerto Rican population in the country, at 121,643 according to the 2010 Census.

Hurricane Maria is just the latest in a string of natural disasters that have struck with ever-increasing frequency, and which have placed additional burdens on local governments — not just those directly impacted, but by the safe havens that take in thousands of people left displaced and dislodged of all worldly possessions by these storms.

Philadelphia Councilwoman María Quiñones-Sánchez, whose 7th District includes some of the city’s largest concentrations of Puerto Ricans, said she gets about a dozen calls a night from constituents who are bringing their family.

“I would venture to guess that about half of every daily flight from American Airlines is coming with people who are coming to stay temporarily or are really seeking some sort of refuge until the things in Puerto Rico normalize — whatever the new normal is going to be there,” said Quiñones-Sánchez, who herself moved to Philadelphia from Puerto Rico as a child.