The main reservoir above Debar receives water for more than 40,000 people. The town has no more than 10,000 residents, plus a few thousand returning emigrants who arrive between late July and mid-August. The arithmetic is not complicated. And yet the Venec 1, Venec 2, Taranik and Kjernanica neighbourhoods are under restrictions - four hours a day from 1 July, then five, and on the upper floors there is no water for considerably longer.

So the water exists. The problem is that it does not reach the tap.

The public utility Standard is appealing to residents to use water only for essential needs - no watering gardens, no filling pools, no hosing down yards and pavements. "Any other use that is not essential is considered abuse," they say, adding that every litre saved helps more families have drinking water.

The appeal is reasonable. But the utility also said the other half of the story out loud, and that half is far more interesting: "Better planning, timely investment and more efficient management should have prevented this or significantly reduced it." That is a sentence you rarely hear from a public utility in this country. An admission that the problem is not only about who is filling a swimming pool.

The remaining reasons are listed without much decoration: restrictions have been introduced every summer for years because of water misuse, a large number of consumers do not pay their bills, and there are illegal connections. An illegal connection means somebody has hooked into the system and pays nothing, while the neighbour on the fifth floor waits for water to arrive.

The irony is in the source. The Rosoki - Debar waterworks draws from springs in the village of Rosoki, Mala Reka - by the utility's own account, among the highest-quality in Europe. Debar is not a town in a desert. Debar is a town sitting above a spring, where people count the hours until the next water.

There are restrictions in Dolno Kosovrasti too, home to the spa complex, from 10:00 to 13:00. That is the place meant to be bringing in tourists.

Whether residents heed the appeal is a question of a few weeks. The question that outlasts it is why a town with a spring serving four times its population enters the same cycle every summer, and who exactly answers for those "timely investments" that, as the utility itself concedes, never happened.