Ministers reject ‘baseless’ report on Carmel fire disaster

Reacting to a highly critical report on the government’s handling of the Carmel Fire disaster Wednesday, Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Finance Minster Yuval Steinitz denounced the state comptroller’s “baseless” findings and called for a government review.

State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss said Yishai and Steinitz were the ministers most at fault for failures relating to the December 2010 blaze, the worst in Israel’s history, in which 44 people lost their lives.

Following the report’s publication, Army Radio reported that several of the fire victims’ families announced on Wednesday evening that they will  petition the High Court demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismiss both Yishai and Steinitz from their ministerial positions in light of the comptroller’s findings.

The Finance Ministry responded to the report with an unusually harsh condemnation: “To our dismay, as regards the Finance Ministry, the report remains surreal and baseless in the extreme.”

The report’s requirements for funding the fire services, the statement continued, made staying within budgetary constraints impossible, and as such “threaten the financial stability of Israel.”

The Finance Ministry did not acknowledge any shortcomings in its handling of Israel’s fire-fighting capacity.

Yishai said he would demand a government discussion to draw conclusions from the report, and to set special rules for determining the requirements concerning life-and-death issues.

Yishai congratulated himself regarding his overseeing of Israel’s firefighting apparatus, saying, “If there hadn’t been deaths, I would have deserved a medal.”

The interior minister challenged the validity of the comptroller’s findings regarding preparedness and equipment and the Carmel Fire disaster, asserting that “there was no connection between the firefighting preparedness and the decisions that led to the disaster.”

On the contrary, Yishai added, the comptroller’s report showed that during his tenure as interior minister “an unprecedented effort was made to improve the firefighting system.”

The prime minister responded to the state comptroller’s report, which noted his overall responsibility for ministers’ handling of the fire and the wider firefighting apparatus, by thanking Lindenstrauss for his work, and pledging to continue to work to implement the necessary changes.

“Some of the deficiencies noted by the comptroller were addressed immediately after the Carmel disaster: A fire-fighting flight squadron was established, and since last year it has put out hundreds of fires, including the large fire near Jerusalem. The fire service was moved from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Public Safety, and hundreds of millions of shekels were invested in the construction of eight new fire houses, the recruitment of 300 new firefighters, and the acquisition of 89 fire trucks,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Netanyahu added that the comptroller noted favorably his involvement in securing assistance from 12 different states to douse the blaze, noting that without the 38 planes sent to Israel by helpful countries, the rescue services would not have been able to control the fire.

The Kadima party said that the government must do “everything in its power” to be fully prepared for future natural disasters.

“The comptroller has exposed serious faults in the firefighters’ basic readiness. Regrettably, there are still significant gaps that have yet to be addressed since the Carmel disaster.”