Haifa fire under control
The massive Carmel forest fire just north of Haifa was declared under control at about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon. "Our news for this evening is control," fire official Boaz Rakia told reporters at nightfall Sunday. "The fire department has declared that the fire is under control." He added that the small fires are still burning in some places.Thank God.
He said that most of the thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes would be allowed to return.
"From our point of view, the danger has passed for all the places that were evacuated," Rakia said. The sole exception, he said, was Kibbutz Beit Oren, located in the heart of the fire zone, where extensive fire damage would prevent residents from immediately returning.
Magen David Adom officials also announced that 33 individuals suffering from fire-related injuries were evacuated to area hospitals during the three-day blaze. Three of the wounded suffered from serious injuries, three were moderately hurt and the rest were lightly wounded.
Earlier on Sunday afternoon the Police announced that all major fires in the North were contained as of 4:30 p.m. The announcement came 77 hours after firefighters began their efforts to contain the effort.
"There are no large fire sites at this time, just small ones that are being tackled [by firefighters]," the Police spokesperson's office said in a statement released Sunday afternoon.
At sundown on Sunday, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The Associated Press that there have been 20 arson attempts in other forests over the past 48 hours, and four people have been arrested.
All the foreign firefighting planes are expected to stay in Israel until tomorrow to ensure that the blaze has been put out, Israel Radio reported Sunday evening.
Labels: arson, Carmel forest, forest fire, Haifa
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:08 PM
3 Comments:
Correction: the fire zone is to the South of Haifa.
Our congratulations to the firefighters to a job well done against impossible odds. But its the people of Israel who rose to the occasion. If they can deal with this, they can handle Hezbollah and Iran.
Count on it.
Steven Plaut reports seeing miracles in Haifa:
At the Nir Etzion religious kibbutz, the fire did not enter an eruv.
And while everything else at the Yemin boarding school library was torched, a Bible was unscathed.
Boruch Kodosh Hu has a sense of humor. Divine miracles? In Israel, Hanukkah imports some very important signs of G-d at work in the world.
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