State-owned company, 5 executives face trial over massive Arava oil spill

The state prosecution announces that the state-owned Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Company (EAPC), along with five current and former senior employees of the company, could stand trial, pending a hearing, over their alleged role in an oil spill that devastated a nature reserve in southern Israel.

Last year, a settlement was reached in a class action suit determining that EAPC will pay NIS 100 million ($28 million) in damages over the December 2014 oil spill, considered the worst ecological disaster in the country’s history.

According to the Environmental Protection Ministry, some 5 million liters of crude oil were spilled when a pipeline belonging to EAPC ruptured, causing significant environmental damage to the Arava desert and Evrona Nature Reserve.

According to a statement released by the Environmental Protection Ministry today, on December 3, 2014, during work to relocate a pipe there was an engineering fault that caused the pipe to rupture, precipitating the oil spill, which caused some NIS 100 million in damage.

It says that according to suspicions, the accident was mainly due to faulty implementation of EAPC’s own regulations, including failure to draw up a detailed plan for the work and a lack of coordination between the relevant departments in the company.