Hundreds of thousands of bottles of water languished on an abandoned airport runway in Puerto Rico while the island faced severe shortages in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, it has emerged.
The huge supply was shown sitting on tarmac at José Aponte de la Torre Airport in aerial photographs posted to Facebook by Abdiel Santana, who works United Forces of Rapid Action agency of the Puerto Rico Police.
Mr Santana told CBS News that he first saw thousands of boxes stacked there a year ago, and took the photographs because he is angry they are still there.
"Believe it or not...nearly a million boxes of water that were never delivered to the people of P.R. during the emergency of Hurricane Maria," Mr Santana posted on Facebook in Spanish. "Is there someone that can explain this?"
The pictures were posted the same day that US President Donald Trump said his administration got "A pluses" in their response to Hurricane Maria.
Maria, a Category 4 hurricane, brought winds of 155 miles per hour to the Caribbean island on September 20, 2017, resulting in an official death toll of 64.
However a government-commissioned study by George Washington University published last month found that 2,975 people died within six months of the storm amid widespread shortages of clean drinking water, medical care, food and power.
More than a million people were without drinkable water by October, and forced to use sources such as rivers or springs instead.
Officials are now trying to find out how the bottles went unused, and the spotlight has fallen on the island's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Read More
Marty Bahamonde, director of disaster operations at FEMA, confirmed to CBS that the agency imported the water, however it is not yet clear exactly what happened next.
Buzzfeed News reports that a FEMA spokesperson claims it found after the delivery that it had a surplus supply of water, and signed the shipment over to to a different government agency, the General Services Administration (GSA).
Ottmar Chávez, the administrator of Puerto Rico's General Services Administration, said the bottles were transferred to the GSA in May 2018.
Mr Chávez, who was not yet head of the agency at the time, said the GSA subsequently received complaints that the water smelled and tasted bad, leading some to believe it had spoiled by being left for months on the runway in the sun.
Hurricane Maria - In pictures
Mr Santana's photographs have been shared 19,000 times and Puerto Ricans commented on the Facebook post to voice their outrage.
"What a shame," wrote one person, while another wrote: "How sad that it is no longer drinkable."