Petrești commune, in the Ungheni district, enters July with dry taps and frayed nerves. Since late June, more and more residents write in the village group that they go days without water, and on 5 July the discontent crystallised into a petition to the mayor’s office and the Local Council: people demand an inquiry into how the water service is managed, a public schedule of the cut-offs and, “if wrongdoing is found”, the removal from office of the official in charge of water distribution.
“Numerous residents of the village are left without access to drinking water for whole days, and in some cases even weeks,” the petition reads, also complaining that “water distribution is not carried out fairly and efficiently”. The document — a public post signed by a woman resident — lists five requests, from investigating the service to publicly informing citizens “about the measures taken and the remediation deadlines”. It is, for now, one side’s position: a demand for accountability, not proof that anyone breached their duties.
Nine days of complaints
The petition did not come out of nowhere. Nine days earlier, on 26 June, a resident of the village’s “hill area” reported that water is frequently cut off there, “even though in other areas water is available in sufficient quantities”. On 30 June, another post spoke of “five days” without water, “especially for families with small children”. On 3 July, a message summed up the community’s exasperation: “Two days with no water at all. Should we be told to stock up more?”
All of this fell exactly over the heatwave: in Ungheni, forecasters kept an orange heat code on 30 June – 1 July, with highs of +36…+38 °C and tropical nights — that is, precisely the period when household water use spikes, for watering and cooling off.
What the mayor’s office says: a new well and the drought
The local authority had responded publicly before the petition. On 27 June, Mayor Serghei Gorea posted a message acknowledging the problem and listing the measures taken:
We understand the discontent caused by the lack of water and assure you that this problem does not leave us indifferent. The mayor’s office of Petrești commune, the Local Council and the M.E. Servicom-Petrești are taking measures to improve the situation. A new well has recently been dug, and in the coming period the works needed to ensure better access to water for all residents will continue. […] No one is favoured, and the efforts are made for the whole community. At the same time, the climatic conditions and dry spells affect water resources and the functioning of the supply system. Serghei Gorea, mayor of Petrești commune
The claim about the well is backed by documents. A month earlier, on 27 May 2026, the Petrești Local Council adopted, with 12 votes “for”, Decision No. 03/9: at the operator’s request, the councillors allowed “the execution of works to build a well to supply drinking water” and allocated 90,000 lei for it from the balance at the start of the year. In other words, the authority did not sit on its hands — it put money on the table. The trouble is that, more than a month later and with the petition already filed, the cut-offs continued.
One thing that people insistently ask for is, however, missing from the mayor’s office’s reply: a schedule. Under the 27 June statement, many residents asked, just as under the petition, whether there is “a schedule saying when the water is shut off, so we can stock up” — a cheap transparency measure that requires no investment, only a timely announcement. The editorial team did not find such a public schedule on the mayor’s office’s official channels that it was able to check.
Why it is precisely a large village left without water
The paradox of Petrești is that this is not some hamlet forgotten by the networks. On the contrary: by the number of houses connected to the mains, it is one of the district’s largest villages. National Bureau of Statistics data show 1,052 connected dwellings in Petrești village in 2024 (plus 166 in Medeleni), up steadily from 832 in 2016 — the second-largest village system in the Ungheni district, after Pîrlița. Over the same period, water supplied to the population rose to 71 thousand cubic metres a year (from 59.4 in 2023), while total abstraction fell slightly. Translated: more and more households draw on the same source, which does not grow as fast — a network stretched beyond its capacity, exactly the pattern that produces weak pressure and shut-offs at peak hours.
Who manages the water matters too. Unlike Ungheni city — where the network is held by Apă-Canal Ungheni, fed from the Prut, with its own breakdowns — Petrești depends on its own municipal enterprise, ME Servicom-Petrești, which runs a local groundwater system and into which the former “Apa-Medeleni” was absorbed in 2023. The tariff is approved by the Local Council, not by ANRE. The commune is not even included in the big regional water projects — extending the municipal network towards Petrești remains a plan for the future. In practice, the village fends for itself.
As for the drought invoked by the mayor: it explains part, but not all. The State Hydrometeorological Service’s warning for 1–8 July 2026 places the southern Prut sector, Leova–Brânza, under an orange code — not the Ungheni area — and Petrești does not drink from the Prut anyway. What really presses is the heatwave, which swells demand, on top of a groundwater source and a network already at its limit.
What comes next
The petition leaves the ball in the local authorities’ court: an inquiry, measures, transparency and, if needed, sanctions. Who exactly the “official in charge of water distribution” targeted by the dismissal request is does not follow from the public documents, and at this stage cannot be named — it may be the enterprise’s administrator or a technical employee, and the difference matters. What can be asked for without any investment, as soon as tomorrow, is the very thing people have been repeating for more than a week: a clear schedule of the cut-offs, so that a household with small children knows when to store water.
Before publication, the editorial team asked the Petrești mayor’s office and ME Servicom-Petrești for their point of view. On 6 July, the mayor’s office replied that the request had landed in the Spam folder and was only seen then, that the enterprise’s administrator and the intervention team were “on the ground” assessing the situation and carrying out works, and requested additional time for “a complete and documented answer”, promised “as soon as possible”. By the time this article was published, that substantive answer — on the causes of the cut-offs, on the schedule people ask for, and on the petition — had not arrived.