"My heart goes out to the bereaved families on this difficult and painful day; the state comptroller's report proves that when cabinet ministers make demands for life-saving measures their requests should be deliberated in a most sincere way," Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) said on Wednesday. He was speaking after the publication of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss' report on the 2010 Mount Carmel fire, which faulted him and other government officials for their conduct before and during the disaster in December that year. The fire claimed 44 lives and was one of the worst natural disasters in Israeli history. Yishai, who was responsible for fire-fighting and emergency services at the time of the fire and is cited for failing to do more to prevent a large-scale disaster, said he would demand a special cabinet discussion to devise a policy for life-saving measures and emergency situations. Control of the fire service has since been transferred to the Public Security Ministry. The report said Yishai, along with Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, bore "special responsibility" for severe shortcomings in the state's preparedness for the fire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bore "overall responsibility" for failing to end the infighting between the various government agencies and for failing to use his clout to appropriate the necessary resources for the fire service. Thousands of residents were temporarily displaced in the wake of the fire, which was the largest and longest wildfire in Israel's history, and 44 people were killed, most of them Israel Prison Service cadets who had been dispatched to the area to evacuate a nearby prison and save the mostly Palestinian prisoners, and who were burned alive when their bus caught fire on the narrow road leading up the mountain. Throughout the 506-page report, Lindenstrauss cites many flaws in the way emergency services, firefighters, police, prison authorities and others tasked with handling the situation conducted themselves. Local municipalities, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Defense Ministry were all cited as well for hampering the efforts to contain the blaze through their inaction. One of the failures, approved for publication ahead of the report's official release to the public, deals with the amount of disposable fire retardant. According to the country's emergency doctrine, at least 250 tons of retardant must be kept in stock at all times, of which 200 tons must be available for emergencies. When the Carmel fire broke out, only 20 tons of the material was in the strategic reserves, less than 10 percent of the required amount. Lindenstrauss also placed some of the blame on Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, as well as on senior fire-fighting, police and prison service officials for past and present mismanagement of the emergency response system. "The comptroller made a clear distinction between the tragic loss and horrific death of the 44 victims and the preparedness of the Israel Fire and Rescue Services, which goes to show that the decisions which led to the disaster could have been made even if the firefighters had been fully prepared and equipped with the most advanced tools," Yishai claimed, before vehemently rejecting the comptroller's accusations. "There is an unprecedented number of passages 26 in the report that shows that during my term in office there was an effort unlike any other to rehabilitate the fire service. The response [to the report] by the firefighters and most of the bereaved families has been very touching. It is my personal duty to fight for them and to promise them I will not let up until the lessons are learned. While this will not bring their loved ones back, it will spare grief and sorrow from other families in the future; this could provide some comfort." Just hours before the report came out on Wednesday, Yishai visited the home of prison officer Yochai Dayan, who died in the bus incident. The bereaved family came out in support of Yishai and said the blame should be apportioned to the Israel Police, the Israel Prison Service and the fire service. Steinitz, who was also cited as having "special responsibility" for the fire, said that the report effectively stripped the Finance Ministry of the authority to manage the state budget and forced the finance minister to meddle in other ministries' affairs on a daily basis. "It is inconceivable to suggest that the finance minister has to micromanage the processes that affect the conduct and rehabilitation of the emergency services in Israel; this is the responsibility of the relevant cabinet members," Steinitz said. Reacting to the comptroller's assertion that managing the fire service could not be compared to the responsibilities of other government ministries, Steinitz said such assertions were dangerous."If budgets pertaining to human lives are more important than other ministries' budgets, the education and welfare budgets will always be smaller than the security and health care budgets," he said. Steinitz also said the sections pertaining to the Finance Ministry were "divorced from reality and baseless, and threaten Israel's financial health by severely compromising the ability to enforce the budgetary legislation." He said he had appropriated NIS 100 million (about $25 million) to replenish the fire service's inventory, unlike his predecessors who allegedly made funding contingent on structural reform. A Steinitz associate said Wednesday that the interior minister was directly responsible for the fire service and having the finance minister and the interior minister share equal blame was flawed. "The consequences are clear every time there is a mass-casualty incident which falls under the responsibility of a certain cabinet minister, the finance minister would be held accountable," the supporter of the finance minister said. The Prime Minister's Office issued a short statement on Wednesday in reaction to the report, saying, "The prime minister is studying the findings of the review conducted by the state comptroller and thanks the comptroller for his work; the prime minister will continue to work to address the shortcomings." "Some of the faults specified in the report were addressed immediately after the disaster an aerial fire-fighting unit that was set up in the wake of the incident extinguished more than 100 fires over the past year, including the large wildfire in Jerusalem, the statement said. Responsibility over the fire service was transferred to the Ministry of Public Security and hundreds of million of shekels have been appropriated for the creation of eight fire stations, the hiring of 300 more firefighters and the procurement of 89 more fire trucks." The statement also said, "Had the prime minister not asked other countries to dispatch airborne fire-fighting aircraft, the Carmel forest fire could not have been successfully extinguished." The comptrollers report elicited mixed reaction among politicians. Opposition leader MK Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) said that "the reckless way human lives were expended while destroying and drying up the fire service were all a result of deliberate foul play that was designed to impose unclear reforms; the era of the Finance Ministry's far-reaching authority without accountability is over." Yachimovich went on to praise the comptroller for "highlighting the unacceptable and lethal conduct that cost lives and exposed Israel at its weakest point; with such a report, Steinitz and Netanyahu can no longer brush off responsibility for the results of a destructive economic policy." Meretz leader MK Zahava Gal-On said the report underscored the notion that the interior minister had to resign, but dismissed the notion that Steinitz was also at fault: "Describing the finance minister as responsible for all the shortcomings is absurd; he is responsible for deficits and growth but not for the Israel Fire and Rescue Services." MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) attacked Lindenstrauss, saying that the "comptroller and the media's obsession with assigning guilt rather than on addressing the shortcomings will bring about the next disaster. Because instead of mending our ways we will have dealt with whose head will roll." Knesset Finance Committee Chairman MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) defended Steinitz and Yishai, saying that the attacks on them were unwarranted. "The State of Israel suffered from a systemic failure years on end; successive governments left the fire service to its own devices and failed to address it properly, Gafni said. This is not about some minister's particular wrongdoing but about the entire system's failure." President Shimon Peres also commented on the report Thursday, saying that Israel had to let go of the past when it comes to such tragic incidents. "The past is dead. You can't correct it. Can you correct something that is dead? Can you correct the past? Focus on the future. You have to take risks," Peres said. "You have to choose between two sorts of mistakes. You do nothing and that is a mistake, or you do something that could cause the mistakes." Peres, who was speaking at the fourth annual Israeli Presidential Conference, said this also applied to the recent state comptrollers report on the deadly IDF raid on a Turkish flotilla heading to the Gaza Strip in 2010. Peres said it was better to scrutinize successes rather than failures to evaluate how things had been done properly and learn from them.
