The operating theatres at the town hospital in Gostivar are closed. The reason is not a shortage of doctors, nor of electricity, nor of patients. The reason is that there is no safe water to sterilise the equipment. Acute cases are being sent to Tetovo.

This is the fourteenth day since the ban on drinking water from the town's taps came into force. Hospital director Emri Bajrami confirmed the closure. That is the sentence that shows the real scale of the crisis - not how many bottles have been handed out, but what has stopped working.

The minister says the acute phase is passing

Health Minister Sasho Klekovski said the epidemiological situation is gradually stabilising and that the drinking water analysis is expected by 20 August. The number of newly reported patients with stomach problems has ranged between 40 and 80 in recent days, while the normal pre-epidemic occurrence, according to him, is between 25 and 100 cases.

That is good news if you read the numbers as numbers. Read as the life of a town, they look different. Klekovski stressed that the epidemic will not officially be declared over until the suspicion that new cases are linked to the water has been removed.

The head of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, Stojanche Angelov, said three independent laboratories are taking samples and that the frequency has been stepped up - now every 12 hours.

Twenty days without a single drop

While the analyses are being debated, in the Ciglana neighbourhood around 100 people in 15 houses have had no water at all for more than twenty days. Not contaminated water, not even non-potable water. Residents travel daily with bottles and containers to a well three to four kilometres away.

The reason is the cleaning of the water system, initially expected to take one to two weeks. Engineers explain that the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium develops in stagnant water and that mechanical flushing of the pipes is now required. It was found in small colonies at around 30 percent of the tested points.

Supply to the neighbourhoods runs on a schedule, by tanker: Debreshe, the Bechtel-Enka site with 14 tonnes, the Oslomej power plant with 9 tonnes, Ciglana and the Bogovinje municipality with 4 tonnes, Belovishte and the fire brigade with 2 tonnes.

Who pays the bill

The Gostivar municipal council is working on a proposal that citizens should not pay for the contaminated water from the town's taps. That a decision has to be taken at all says everything - it means no automatic mechanism exists, and that without a vote the bills would arrive as usual.

Klekovski called on those making accusations to file a specific criminal complaint if they believe a crime has been committed, saying that statements at press conferences without citing a law are bad political marketing.

He is right that an accusation without an article of law is a weak thing. But the reverse holds too: two weeks without drinking water, closed operating theatres and houses waiting for a tanker are not political marketing - they are a situation somebody created, and that somebody still has no name.