As the fires are still smoldering in what has been called Israel’s worst natural disaster ever, adjusters are beginning to trek up north to assess the damage that is estimated in the billions of shekels. While international rescue and relief efforts from a variety of sources have helped contain the catastrophic blaze, Israelis are asking whether their helplessness in the face of such an environmental calamity portends a vulnerability greater than the threats of bombs and rockets.
Moshe Mir of Kibbutz HaChotrim sounded composed and measured on Sunday morning after spending a restful Shabbos with his wife and children at his parents’ in Holon sixty miles safely removed from the raging Carmel fires in the foothills of Haifa. But what he saw on Thursday from his home in those foothills was a terrifying picture.
“It looked like the end of the world. Mount Carmel looked like a volcano raining fire and ash down the slopes” said Mir.
The kibbutz home to about 500 people was one of several whose residents were ordered to evacuate in the face of a massive forest fire. The blaze was apparently started by two Druze youths who have been arrested and are under interrogation at press time for allegedly failing to extinguish a fire they set when smoking a narghile in the nearby Druze village of Ifsiyah.
The Mir family was among the estimated 15000 Israelis ordered to evacuate their homes in advance of the fire that broke out on the first day of Chanukah and was poised to threaten Haifa Israel’s third-most populous city. Flames and billowing smoke all along the Carmel ridge were visible in Zichron Yaakov more than twenty miles to the south.
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