Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai is facing a deluge of criticism for the tragic drowning of a young couple in a flooded elevator in south Tel Aviv. Others are pointing fingers at Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services which reportedly took a half-hour to an hour to respond to the building residents’ frantic calls for help.

Dean Shoshani and Stav Harari drowned in a flooded elevator on the basement level of a residential building in south Tel Aviv on Shabbos, when the entire Gush Dan area received an unprecedented amount of rain within two hours. By the time the rescue services showed up 30 to 60 minutes after they were called, the entire bottom level of the building was completely flooded and a complex rescue operation, involving scuba divers and specialized equipment was performed only to extricate the couple’s lifeless bodies.

Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services conducted an investigation into the incident and stated its preliminary findings on Sunday, saying that rescue services, which received thousands of calls that day due to the stormy weather and flooding, responded appropriately to the incident. The department was tending to a fire on the same street before responding to the incident and another life-threatening incident in the area was responded to at the same time as the elevator incident. Nevertheless, when rescue services arrived at the scene, they evaluated the situation, called for specialized rescue teams and performed an extremely arduous rescue operation. The investigation’s preliminary conclusion was that the tragic incident was unavoidable and was the result of an exceptionally rare situation caused by the unusual amount of rain which resulted in a complete collapse of the drainage system.

However, residents of south Tel Aviv pointed finger at local government officials, saying that the municipality had ignored warnings for years of the poor infrastructure in the Hatikva neighborhood of south Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai denied the accusations, stating that Tel-Aviv-Yafo received about 20% of its annual precipitation within two hours and that no drainage system in the world could have contained the rainfall levels which were “a once-in-50-years [incident]” and that south Tel Aviv received twice as much rain as other areas of the city.

Furthermore, Huldai emphasized that the municipality had adequately prepared for the winter, maintained the city’s drainage system and took all necessary measures to prevent flooding, adding that he had invested 1.2 billion shekels in infrastructure in south Tel Aviv in the past decade. “Even when there were no other means, I invested in the drainage efforts in the Hatikva neighborhood and in Yafo,” Huldai said.

“What happened here was a one-time event that happens at times, like in a bathtub – when you take the plug out it takes time for the water to go down,” Huldai explained. “The amount of water was greater than the capability of the drainage.”

Gilad Sapir, a hydrologist and environmental expert quoted by The Jerusalem Post reached the same conclusion as Huldai, saying that the flooding in the elevator could not have been prevented since the drainage system simply couldn’t withstand the amount of rainfall.

“The current infrastructures functioned at the capacity that they were built for,” Sapir confirmed to the Post. “You can tell because an hour after the rains stopped, the floods stopped as well. [The drainage sytem] simply could not cope [with the amount of rainfall] on Saturday.”

Sapir explained that Israel’s plumbing systems are no longer adequate since cities have grown and urban areas create a larger flow of rainwater than open areas. “Drainage infrastructure is the most expensive urban infrastructure by far,” he said. “In Tel Aviv, the drainage infrastructure is worth NIS 1b. This is not the amount they have invested but rather the amount that must be invested in order to reach the place we would like to be. This project can last decades.”

The Post also spoke to attorney Mark Leizerowitz who explained that according to tort law, the blame actually lies with the building committee (Va’ad Bayit), the committee formed by the tenants of each residential building to tend to the upkeep and maintenance of the building, such as plumbing, electricity, the elevator and the roof.

“This situation involves an extreme, but not unexpected, amount of water,” Leizerowitz told the Post. “There have already been similar incidents, there have been floods this size, and I know that in the Hatikva neighborhood, as well, because of the poor infrastructure, there have been incidents on this scale. The agent directly responsible for the functionality of the elevator is the building committee.”

Leizorowitz added that the next one in line in the “chain of blame” would be whoever built the residential building and then the elevator contractor. The rescue services – the police and fire department are the last in line in the “chain of blame,” he said.

“Here, specifically, I am not sure that the responsibility lies on the police and on the firefighters. The amount of pressure on the firefighters and the police was unusual, I believe.”

An additional and very incriminating factor of who was responsible was added to the fray on Monday when Walla News published a report saying that the chairman of the firefighter’s union, Avi Ankori, had declared pre-strike conditions on Friday, the day before the tragic incident. The pre-strike conditions put Israel’s Fire and Rescue services in “Shabbat mode” of responding to only non-emergency calls.

The report said that the firefighter’s union had reportedly demanded certain financial conditions and when those were not met, Ankori wrote a letter on Friday to Histadrut labor federation chairman Arnon Bar-David and Public Security Minister MK Gilad Erdan, stating that the firefighters would be working on “Shabbat mode” with “no exceptions.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)