For more than two months, Kevin Reiss and his wife have been bathing with water hauled in buckets, pouring it over their heads with a Tupperware cup. They can’t flush their toilets, and pay $200 a month to use a portable toilet outside their home.It’s how they’ve been living since Hurricane Lala struck Hawaii Island in mid-August, knocking out water and sewer service to about 100 properties in the rural southeastern community of Punaluu, an area known widely for its black sand beach.“Everybody’s at wit’s end right now,” Reiss told SFGATE, describing the possibility that restoring water could take up to two years. “That’s completely unacceptable.”Residents haven’t received water or other assistance from the privately owned utility, Punaluu Water and Sanitation LLC, nor its owner, he said. “They’ve done nothing basically to try to remedy the situation,” he said.The utility responsible for their water and sewer service is not insured, has no money secured for repairs and no timeline for restoring service, according to Colin Sakamoto, the utility’s attorney, at an Oct. 19 meeting called by the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission to address the outage and the utility’s plans to restore service. The commission also acknowledged residents’ reports of “inadequate and untimely communication” from the utility. “Unfortunately, we can’t even afford a portable water tank at this time,” Sakamoto said.

The water and sanitation company’s equipment has been severely damaged.

The utility is owned by Xiaoyuan “Eva” Liu, a real estate investor who has business ties to the San Francisco Bay Area, including Pleasanton and Dublin. In 2020, another Liu entity, Black Sand Beach LLC,........

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