While the mayor was drinking water in front of the cameras to calm the panic, the experts were talking about something else - the abandoned landfill of the former Jugohrom plant in Jegunovce, full of hexavalent chromium, some thirty kilometres from the Rašče spring.

This is not new information, and that is exactly what makes it heavier. The landfill has been sitting there for decades. No laboratory report on Skopje's water changes its condition, because the danger it poses is not measured in today's sample but in what happens if it ever reaches the groundwater flows.

Environmental coordinator Iva Petrovska's formulation is as short as it needs to be: „If that hexavalent chromium reaches water, the water becomes unusable for everything.” Not for drinking. For everything.

Less than one percent of the budget

What makes this story damning is that the solution is known and costed. A hydro engineer points out that the clean-up has to begin before it is too late, and according to estimates cited in expert assessments, the work - sealing it off or building a sarcophagus over the landfill - would cost under one percent of the state budget.

Under one percent. For a risk that, according to those same assessments, concerns the water supply of around one third of the country's population.

Anyone looking for an explanation of why citizens believe a message sent at midnight faster than they believe an institution has the answer right there. This is not naivety. It is habit - for decades people have watched a known, costed and solvable problem sit unsolved, so they conclude that the unknown one is surely sitting there too.

The prosecution is checking, but checking what exactly

The public prosecutor's office has opened checks connected to the events around the Rašče spring and the quality of the water, with the aim of establishing what exactly happened and whether there was any danger to citizens. It has to determine whether this is a real quality problem, a failure in procedure, or information that caused unwarranted alarm.

Those checks come after something that is neither rumour nor panic. In Gostivar, analyses recently showed significant microbiological contamination, a ban was issued on using the city's water for drinking and food preparation, and the prosecution opened an investigation against three people. Several institutions joined that investigation - the police, the Institute of Public Health and the Food and Veterinary Agency.

So the question is not whether water here can be contaminated. It already was, this year, an hour's drive from Skopje.

Yesterday's message was untrue and that has been established. But the mistrust it carried across the city within hours was not invented by that message, nor by the opposition. It was built by a landfill that has spent decades waiting for one percent of the budget.