AMN calls on Government to establish direct contact with local authorities and take join emergency measures nationwide

The Moldova Noastra Alliance Party (AMN) calls upon the Government to immediately establish direct contact with the local authorities and implement join emergency measures on a national scale. In a statement, the party’s president Serafim Urecheanu points to the lack of governmental measures aimed at managing the gas crisis in all the country’s settlements in concert with the administrations of all levels. According to the AMN, the Government reacts with delay to this serious challenge and takes only superficial measures that concern several companies only and ignore the situation in the towns, district centers and villages heavily dependent on gas. The local authorities are left to cope by themselves with these serious problems, being abandoned by the Special Commission of the Government, the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Local Public Administration, the Civil Protection and Emergencies Service, the National Agency for Energy Regulation, Moldova-Gaz, the Agency of State Reserves and other central institutions. “President Vladimir Voronin is holidaying abroad as it happened in other crisis situations, while his arrogance in the relations with the neighboring countries does not allow us now to seek help from them as we did previously,” the statement says. “The AMN representatives from local public administrations of the first and second levels informed us that they take decisions by themselves in order to reduce the effects of a thermo-energy catastrophe. The Chisinau City Hall made public the measures taken by it. The towns of Orhei and Cahul take steps to pump the water out of the heating systems so as to avoid their destruction by freezing. Ungheni is a specific case as this town’s centralized heating system works exclusively on natural gas and no shift to other fuel is possible. The pressure in the heating pipes has decreased four times and risks dropping to zero until Friday. Consequently, most of the residents would remain in cold even if the gas supply was resumed. The local authorities called extraordinary meetings and informed the central authorities, but no reaction followed. The mayor of the town had to formulate a series of recommendations and made them public through the local television. The public broadcaster Teleradio-Moldova and the Government should also inform the population about the measures they must take if no gas is supplied through the pipes, the AMN leader said. Serafim Urecheanu also said that in such a situation the central and local authorities need additional legal powers to manage the crisis. These powers can be assigned only by declaring a state of emergency. With the ordinary prerogatives, without reserves and solutions to the energy crisis and in the absence of financial resources, the state institutions are practically incapable of taking emergency measures to support the population. Taking into account the acute necessity to protect the population and expressing the demands of the local administrators, which are the same in the given situation regardless of the political colors, Serafim Urecheanu, who is also the leader of the AMN group in the Parliament, demands that the Government establish direct contact with the local authorities of all levels and take join emergency measures nationwide.