The Hilo area was among the first to get power back following Hurricane Lala, but Waiakea Villas, located in the middle of town, has been without electricity for over 10 days.

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The Hilo area was among the first to get power back following Hurricane Lala, but Waiakea Villas, located in the middle of town, has been without electricity for over 10 days.

While Hawaiian Electric confirmed it had restored power to that portion of the grid, an issue with the property’s transformer has caused a prolonged outage for the 200-plus unit apartment complex.

Residents said conditions are quickly deteriorating without the ability to store and cook food or cool their homes.

“All of us here had to throw our refrigerators, the food, the freezers, and we can’t keep anything,” said Donna Santos, 74, who lives at Waiakea Villas along with her 95 year-old mother. “We’ve been struggling … we have a lot of elderly people here – that’s what is scary.”

On-site property manager Ruston Swain said he currently does not know when power will be restored.

“I really wish I had a timeline,” he said. “You know, people keep on asking, and I would love to give them a timeline, but … we really don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up, you know, especially with the lack of information.”

He said an assessment from RK Mechanical, the company hired to help fix the issue, revealed that water from the hurricane damaged the property’s electrical equipment.

“They found that there was some excess moisture in the insulators, so they had to make the decision whether or not they should try to obtain the insulators from somewhere else, which will take, you know, up to a month — being that we have to order parts from the mainland — or their other solution was to try and reduce the moisture in the electrical cabinets by running two dehumidifiers in the unit. So, currently, that’s what they’re trying,” Swain said.

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The situation has left Santos and other residents confused and frustrated. Apart from sending out a few emails and setting up a couple of plastic tables with extension cords connected to generators for residents to charge their devices, she said they have heard and seen very little from the property’s management.

“Ten days is kind of outrageous, especially when you live in central Hilo,” she said. “As owners, we pay not only the maintenance fee, but we also do a separate fee that is for emergencies. … All the owners have to pay that — where is that money?”

Residents Jeff Johnson and Greg Gonzalez were sitting outside at one of the makeshift charging stations on Monday.

“It’s been bad, but we’ve been trying to help a lot of the older people in here,” Gonzalez said. “There’s a lot of them in here, so we’ve been trying to help them, but it’s been horrible.”

“It’s about like going back and living in a cave,” Johnson added.

Wendy Workman, another Waiakea Villas resident, said this is not the first time the apartment complex has had electrical issues, and she would like to see the management do more to proactively address such problems.

With the current outage, she said has been especially worried about neighbors with medical needs.

“People that have insulin, they can’t have it, it needs to be like a certain temperature … people have CPAP machines. There’s a person that had surgery and coming home to take care of their surgery needs — they can’t. … Now roaches are coming, people are throwing bags and bags of food away.”

She said members of the complex have been coming together to support each other as much as possible, but that urgent action is needed to resolve the situation.

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“We want solutions,” she said. “And we want permanent solutions that are safe.”

Email Grace Inez Adams at [email protected].