Health emergency near Gostivar, a city of 32 thousand inhabitants in the north-west of North Macedonia, where, since mid-July, more than three thousand people have passed through the emergency room due to vomiting, diarrhea and high fever. The cause, according to the prosecutor’s office, is a water pump installed without authorization in Vrutok, the village on which the city aqueduct depends and which is part of the enlarged municipality of Gostivar (almost 60 thousand inhabitants in total, also counting the villages around the city), a pump which introduced water from the Vardar river into the drinking network. The hospital had to recall the director from vacation to manage the emergency, a case that started as a medical one but became judicial in just a few days.
What happened
The first cases date back to July 14th. In the space of a few days, the influx to the “Dr. Ferid Murad” General Hospital grew at a rate that the facility itself defined as out of scale, with people suffering from vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and high fever. The director, who urgently returned from holidays to coordinate the infectious and pediatric departments, spoke of a number of patients “significantly higher than the usual average” of the facility. On July 17, the Food and Veterinary Agency (AHV) of North Macedonia banned the use of water from the city’s water supply for drinking and cooking, after an extraordinary inspection of the Vrutok plant conducted together with the Ministry of the Environment, the Prosecutor’s Office and the Institute for Public Health. The ban, extended to bars, restaurants and catering activities, will remain in force until laboratory analyzes certify the safety of the water, and to deal with the crisis the Government has decided to distribute around 50 thousand liters of bottled water every day.
The illegal pump and the analyses
The inspection found that in the village of Vrutok, on the main pipe of the network, a pump had been installed without authorization which directly fed water from the Vardar river into the drinking system. Vrutok is not part of the city of Gostivar in the strict sense, but of the enlarged municipality which since 2003 has incorporated the surrounding rural villages, and it is precisely there that the spring on which the entire city water network depends is located. According to the Tetovo Criminal Affairs Sector, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, the pump would have been activated to increase the pressure of the system in a period of summer water shortage, a problem that is very recurrent in the area. The alleged crime is the pollution of drinking water, provided for by article 219 of the Macedonian penal code. The laboratory tests, conducted on orders of the Prosecutor’s Office by the Institute for Public Health on samples taken in four points of the network, ascertained faecal contamination: presence of coliform bacteria in concentrations much higher than normal and of Escherichia coli, as well as anomalous levels of chlorine in one of the samples. This was reported by both BTA, the Bulgarian news agency, and Balkan Insight, which cites the prosecutor’s note according to which the water was rendered “unusable for any purpose” in the overflow chamber of the plant.
The arrests
On July 20, the Gostivar Basic Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation into serious environmental crimes and requested thirty days of pre-trial detention for the director of the public company Komunalec and two technical managers, suspected of having ordered the installation of the pumps on June 25, almost a month before the problem was discovered. Prosecutor Hazbi Iseini, at a press conference, explained that the suspects “would have given instructions to position the pumps” in order to raise the pressure of the network. The subsequent statement from the prosecutor’s office reiterated that the effects of the contamination “cannot be easily eliminated” and confirmed that the suspects remain deprived of liberty while waiting for the judge to rule on precautionary measures. The water company, for its part, had initially classified the incident as an episode of food poisoning linked to the heat. The facts ascertained by the prosecutor’s office tell another story, that of a system tampered with for weeks, while half the city drank the wrong water without knowing it.
