However, while Ilan says his station has received five new trucks and other much-needed equipment, both senior firemen and disaster management experts have stated that there are several systemic structural problems that remain in bringing the country’s firefighting capabilities up to par.In October 2009, more than a year before the Carmel fire, the Fire and Rescue Services commissioner stated that he was short of 200 firefighters and that the services needed an additional 130 fire engines. The services were “in a state of collapse,” he told the prime minister.According to Lindenstrauss’s report, Yishai and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz took an “all-or-nothing approach” to bringing the fire services up to spec, declining to pass along the substantial sums of money widely acknowledged as necessary for a comprehensive modernization program.Following the fire, one of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first steps was to take the responsibility for the Fire and Rescue Services away from Yishai and transfer it to the Public Security Ministry under Yitzhak Aharonovitch.However, even as his ministry has obtained new recruits, trucks and miscellaneous equipment for the ailing services, Aharonovitch has reported to a Knesset committee that only NIS 40 million out of NIS 300m. slated for the services this year has materialized. That is only 13 percent of the promised cash infusion.Since the December 2010 blaze in the Carmel Forest, firefighters have received NIS 400m. in additional funding.Referring to last week’s large blaze on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Aharonovitch told the Knesset last week that “we had a fire yesterday that could have developed to the size of the Carmel fire,” and that “after the State Comptroller’s Report, we must not go back to the stage we were at before the disaster.”In response to Lindenstrauss’s allegations, the Public Security Ministry issued a document listing its improvements to the fire services since it assumed control in January 2011. The ministry, it claims, immediately and without waiting for “the publication of the State Comptroller’s Report... already took steps to improve its capabilities immediately following the Mount Carmel fire.”“We did not wait for the final report,” Aharonovitch said. “Our organizations began implementing reforms immediately in order to be better prepared for the next emergency event.”The minister and his director-general “began conducting a wide-ranging reform with the purpose of establishing a unified, national firefighting force, similar to the structure of the Israel Police and the Israel Prisons Service,” Aharonovitch said in the document. “Additionally hundreds of new firefighters were enlisted, and dozens of fire trucks were acquired, alongside new equipment and improvements to the operational preparedness of the fire service.”Among the improvements, the ministry stated, were the establishment of an aerial firefighting unit under the command of the air force, the formation of a committee dedicated to “establish a national firefighting unit,” and the building of a “national, stateof- the-art control center... at the fire commission headquarters.” Additionally the national fire and rescue academy underwent renovation, and 89 new fire trucks have been procured.However, despite these achievements, says Meir Elran of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, “Israel is very far behind in terms of numbers of firefighters compared with other developed countries.”Elran, a former deputy director of military intelligence and brigadier-general, is an expert on disaster management and homeland security.According to him, while Germany maintains 0.5 firefighters per 1,000 civilians and Japan leads the pack with 1.2 firemen per 1,000, Israel comes in at a lowly 0.16.In fact, notes Elie Peretz, the commander of the fire services’ Jerusalem District, prior to this year’s induction of 300 new firemen, there were only 1,600 firefighters serving a nation of over seven million people.“The standard in all of the developed nations is around one firefighter for every 1,000 residents, like in the US and many other places, and here we have a firefighter for every 5,000-7,000 residents,” Peretz confirms sadly.The problem, he claims, “is one of years of neglect,” and while since the Carmel fire, the government has “started to give the fire department more of what it needs, the service is far from receiving everything that it needs.”The government may have finally gotten serious, he believes.Though he is obviously happy that the stations under his watch have received new equipment, Peretz is careful to note that “our problem is not equipment. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what he is talking about. We have great equipment, the best in the world.”The real problem, he says, “is manpower and trucks.”“In the Beit Shemesh station, we have 90 men,” he reports. “The minimum that we need to serve the local population is at least 150 firemen.”Moreover, he continues, despite the Public Security Ministry’s opening eight new stations, the fire services need around 80 more to cover the country fully.While Peretz is happy with his services’ move to the ministry, Elran is less optimistic.“Technically, in terms of equipment, there was a certain upgrade, but if we are talking about organizational improvements, there were only minor changes,” he says. “In Israel, the firefighters are part and parcel organizationally of the municipalities. So we have a dispersed and decentralized system, which is a major problem because there is no one, unified control.”The main impediment to the country maintaining an efficient fire service is organizational and not related to either equipment or manpower, according to Elran. “Theoretically the fire service was transferred from the Interior Ministry to the Public Security Ministry, but the basic structure of the system is still as it has been for the last 65 years: scattered, disorganized, decentralized and associated with the municipalities, with the local governments.”He adds that “whatever we have in terms of the central command and control... it’s minor and marginal and doesn’t really hold water.”Moreover, he says, the gains made “in terms of equipment and manpower represent some progress, but it’s marginal.”Though he acknowledges that the gains in equipment and manpower “represent some progress,” he says that, too, is marginal.There are several “systemic structural issues” preventing the effective functioning of the fire department, he says, careful to note that while it was important for Lindenstrauss to place blame on specific ministers, the substantive issues of organizational structure deserve more press attention than the “less important issue of the responsibility of Minister X or Y.”He contends that the main question is “who is responsible on the government level. There is not one single minister who is responsible for the whole structure or for the whole system.”As yet, he says, due to the local municipalities retaining significant control over their fire stations, “there is no structure, no doctrine, no motive basis for the operation of the forces,” and the move to place the fire services under the Public Security Ministry will only perpetuate the “division of labor instead of unification of structure.”“That is exactly the problem,” Peretz concurs.“Today there are 24 fire authorities in the entire country and every authority does what it wants.Each one buys the equipment that it wants if it has money. If it doesn’t have money, the authority buys whatever it can afford.”He and Elran agree that the unified fire service that Aharonovitch envisions will only materialize if the Knesset passes the Fire and Rescue Services Bill that has been bandied about the legislature for the past 14 years.The bill, which would reform and unify the fire department in a manner similar to the national police and remove fire stations from the purview of local municipal authorities, is still stuck in the Knesset. While a preliminary hearing of the current version of the bill passed its first reading in March, it has since gotten bogged down over the issue of compensation to local municipalities for the transfer of their equipment to the central government.Also at issue are firefighters’ objections to being turned into civil servants in the state’s employ.“This reform bill will change that to make one national body and to professionalize it,” Peretz hopes. “Now the bodies are under the control of politicians. This will no longer be if the bill passes.There will be one body with a commander, and all of the local regional authorities with their political leaders will be out.”Aharonovitch seems to agree, having said he is happy to see that, as he views it, “all emergency agencies should operate under one authority. This way, everyone understands each other, and there are high operational capabilities.Since I began serving as minister, I have worked to implement this idea. The Mount Carmel disaster served as a turning point in the understanding that this process needs to be at the top of our national priorities.”However, while agreeing that emergency services should have one home and be coordinated, Elran worries about Aharonovitch’s qualifications to lead the fire department, as the minister’s purview is to deal with the national police force and corrections system, and he “is not working on an organizational level with the Home Front Command, Magen David Adom or the municipalities.”As for Aharonovitch’s claim that the fire and rescue services “are currently undergoing comprehensive reforms,” Elran is somewhat skeptical, believing that substantive improvements will only come after the Knesset passes its longsuffering Fire and Rescue Services Bill.“The whole problem, you have to realize, is not only a matter of the fire system. It’s like the comptroller said, this whole fire business is sort of an example or a manifestation of the whole story of the home front,” Elran says. “It’s not only the capacities of the first responders, it’s also the issue of cooperation, or lack of cooperation, between them that’s a major issue, between the firefighters and the policemen, as was revealed in the comptroller’s report.”Moreover, he says, “as long as the fire and rescue services stay the way they are now, associated with the local governments, it means they are very highly paid, but their yield in terms of productivity is very low.”He insists that what is important is making decisions on four major issues “which are very basic in terms of disaster management”: the operational capacity of the first responders; the cooperation and coordination among the different forces or the first responders, including bodies such as the IDF Home Front Command and MDA paramedics; the decision as to who is responsible and who is accountable in the field during a disaster; and the creation of a “normative, constitutional structure for the operation of all the elements together in the home front.”Until these four issues are settled, Elran states, “we are making all kinds of incremental, slow and not very significant progress, and the major issues, the major challenges, are the way they were before.”IMMEDIATELY UPON entering the Beit Shemesh fire station where Peretz is based, one can find a dispatch room filled with flat-screens and other newly acquired command- and-control gear.According to the Public Security Ministry, the “Shalhevet” command-and-control system, which the ministry says “manages the Fire and Rescue Service’s operations,” will be installed in all of the country’s fire stations, “as well as the in the aerial firefighting unit and in the Israel Prisons Service. The system will later be installed in the Home Front Command, Jewish National Fund forest services, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.”However, without a centralized authority to make use of this system and properly maintain organizational links both within the fire service and between it and other organizations, the command-and-control system may prove to be worth less than they would be otherwise.Despite his seeming pessimism regarding certain aspects of the government’s reform efforts, Elran says he is “quite optimistic about the tangible little things” such as the procurement of equipment and trucks.However, he is “not very hopeful about the big things.”“It’s important to buy trucks, don’t misunderstand me, it’s important to recruit more people, it’s important to train them properly... all those things are important, but this will not make the major difference,” he says. “It is just level one.”He is adamant that Israel needs “to equate the structure of the firefighters with that of the police department. That’s the essence of the reform.”Peretz, meanwhile, has a sunnier outlook.The Public Security Ministry is a “natural home” for the fire services, he says, “because we and the national police work together and should be under the same ministry.”He expresses confidence that Aharonovitch “will provide well for the fire department.” However, he also agrees that the final, necessary changes to his service will only come once the Knesset passes the bill.While the necessary comprehensive reforms have not yet passed, and much of the funding required for an overhaul of the antiquated Fire and Rescue Services has not yet materialized, it does seem that a great deal has been accomplished. It just may not be enough when Israel faces its next Carmel fire.In the meantime, the country still faces the absurd situation where its youngest firefighters, such as the teenagers at the Bet Shemesh station, are going out into the field with gear many times older than they are themselves… and that isn’t an encouraging sign.
Ablaze in failure
Despite recent efforts at reform, the Fire and Rescue Services do not match the standards of other industrialized nations.
However, while Ilan says his station has received five new trucks and other much-needed equipment, both senior firemen and disaster management experts have stated that there are several systemic structural problems that remain in bringing the country’s firefighting capabilities up to par.In October 2009, more than a year before the Carmel fire, the Fire and Rescue Services commissioner stated that he was short of 200 firefighters and that the services needed an additional 130 fire engines. The services were “in a state of collapse,” he told the prime minister.According to Lindenstrauss’s report, Yishai and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz took an “all-or-nothing approach” to bringing the fire services up to spec, declining to pass along the substantial sums of money widely acknowledged as necessary for a comprehensive modernization program.Following the fire, one of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first steps was to take the responsibility for the Fire and Rescue Services away from Yishai and transfer it to the Public Security Ministry under Yitzhak Aharonovitch.However, even as his ministry has obtained new recruits, trucks and miscellaneous equipment for the ailing services, Aharonovitch has reported to a Knesset committee that only NIS 40 million out of NIS 300m. slated for the services this year has materialized. That is only 13 percent of the promised cash infusion.Since the December 2010 blaze in the Carmel Forest, firefighters have received NIS 400m. in additional funding.Referring to last week’s large blaze on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Aharonovitch told the Knesset last week that “we had a fire yesterday that could have developed to the size of the Carmel fire,” and that “after the State Comptroller’s Report, we must not go back to the stage we were at before the disaster.”In response to Lindenstrauss’s allegations, the Public Security Ministry issued a document listing its improvements to the fire services since it assumed control in January 2011. The ministry, it claims, immediately and without waiting for “the publication of the State Comptroller’s Report... already took steps to improve its capabilities immediately following the Mount Carmel fire.”“We did not wait for the final report,” Aharonovitch said. “Our organizations began implementing reforms immediately in order to be better prepared for the next emergency event.”The minister and his director-general “began conducting a wide-ranging reform with the purpose of establishing a unified, national firefighting force, similar to the structure of the Israel Police and the Israel Prisons Service,” Aharonovitch said in the document. “Additionally hundreds of new firefighters were enlisted, and dozens of fire trucks were acquired, alongside new equipment and improvements to the operational preparedness of the fire service.”Among the improvements, the ministry stated, were the establishment of an aerial firefighting unit under the command of the air force, the formation of a committee dedicated to “establish a national firefighting unit,” and the building of a “national, stateof- the-art control center... at the fire commission headquarters.” Additionally the national fire and rescue academy underwent renovation, and 89 new fire trucks have been procured.However, despite these achievements, says Meir Elran of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, “Israel is very far behind in terms of numbers of firefighters compared with other developed countries.”Elran, a former deputy director of military intelligence and brigadier-general, is an expert on disaster management and homeland security.According to him, while Germany maintains 0.5 firefighters per 1,000 civilians and Japan leads the pack with 1.2 firemen per 1,000, Israel comes in at a lowly 0.16.In fact, notes Elie Peretz, the commander of the fire services’ Jerusalem District, prior to this year’s induction of 300 new firemen, there were only 1,600 firefighters serving a nation of over seven million people.“The standard in all of the developed nations is around one firefighter for every 1,000 residents, like in the US and many other places, and here we have a firefighter for every 5,000-7,000 residents,” Peretz confirms sadly.The problem, he claims, “is one of years of neglect,” and while since the Carmel fire, the government has “started to give the fire department more of what it needs, the service is far from receiving everything that it needs.”The government may have finally gotten serious, he believes.Though he is obviously happy that the stations under his watch have received new equipment, Peretz is careful to note that “our problem is not equipment. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what he is talking about. We have great equipment, the best in the world.”The real problem, he says, “is manpower and trucks.”“In the Beit Shemesh station, we have 90 men,” he reports. “The minimum that we need to serve the local population is at least 150 firemen.”Moreover, he continues, despite the Public Security Ministry’s opening eight new stations, the fire services need around 80 more to cover the country fully.While Peretz is happy with his services’ move to the ministry, Elran is less optimistic.“Technically, in terms of equipment, there was a certain upgrade, but if we are talking about organizational improvements, there were only minor changes,” he says. “In Israel, the firefighters are part and parcel organizationally of the municipalities. So we have a dispersed and decentralized system, which is a major problem because there is no one, unified control.”The main impediment to the country maintaining an efficient fire service is organizational and not related to either equipment or manpower, according to Elran. “Theoretically the fire service was transferred from the Interior Ministry to the Public Security Ministry, but the basic structure of the system is still as it has been for the last 65 years: scattered, disorganized, decentralized and associated with the municipalities, with the local governments.”He adds that “whatever we have in terms of the central command and control... it’s minor and marginal and doesn’t really hold water.”Moreover, he says, the gains made “in terms of equipment and manpower represent some progress, but it’s marginal.”Though he acknowledges that the gains in equipment and manpower “represent some progress,” he says that, too, is marginal.There are several “systemic structural issues” preventing the effective functioning of the fire department, he says, careful to note that while it was important for Lindenstrauss to place blame on specific ministers, the substantive issues of organizational structure deserve more press attention than the “less important issue of the responsibility of Minister X or Y.”He contends that the main question is “who is responsible on the government level. There is not one single minister who is responsible for the whole structure or for the whole system.”As yet, he says, due to the local municipalities retaining significant control over their fire stations, “there is no structure, no doctrine, no motive basis for the operation of the forces,” and the move to place the fire services under the Public Security Ministry will only perpetuate the “division of labor instead of unification of structure.”“That is exactly the problem,” Peretz concurs.“Today there are 24 fire authorities in the entire country and every authority does what it wants.Each one buys the equipment that it wants if it has money. If it doesn’t have money, the authority buys whatever it can afford.”He and Elran agree that the unified fire service that Aharonovitch envisions will only materialize if the Knesset passes the Fire and Rescue Services Bill that has been bandied about the legislature for the past 14 years.The bill, which would reform and unify the fire department in a manner similar to the national police and remove fire stations from the purview of local municipal authorities, is still stuck in the Knesset. While a preliminary hearing of the current version of the bill passed its first reading in March, it has since gotten bogged down over the issue of compensation to local municipalities for the transfer of their equipment to the central government.Also at issue are firefighters’ objections to being turned into civil servants in the state’s employ.“This reform bill will change that to make one national body and to professionalize it,” Peretz hopes. “Now the bodies are under the control of politicians. This will no longer be if the bill passes.There will be one body with a commander, and all of the local regional authorities with their political leaders will be out.”Aharonovitch seems to agree, having said he is happy to see that, as he views it, “all emergency agencies should operate under one authority. This way, everyone understands each other, and there are high operational capabilities.Since I began serving as minister, I have worked to implement this idea. The Mount Carmel disaster served as a turning point in the understanding that this process needs to be at the top of our national priorities.”However, while agreeing that emergency services should have one home and be coordinated, Elran worries about Aharonovitch’s qualifications to lead the fire department, as the minister’s purview is to deal with the national police force and corrections system, and he “is not working on an organizational level with the Home Front Command, Magen David Adom or the municipalities.”As for Aharonovitch’s claim that the fire and rescue services “are currently undergoing comprehensive reforms,” Elran is somewhat skeptical, believing that substantive improvements will only come after the Knesset passes its longsuffering Fire and Rescue Services Bill.“The whole problem, you have to realize, is not only a matter of the fire system. It’s like the comptroller said, this whole fire business is sort of an example or a manifestation of the whole story of the home front,” Elran says. “It’s not only the capacities of the first responders, it’s also the issue of cooperation, or lack of cooperation, between them that’s a major issue, between the firefighters and the policemen, as was revealed in the comptroller’s report.”Moreover, he says, “as long as the fire and rescue services stay the way they are now, associated with the local governments, it means they are very highly paid, but their yield in terms of productivity is very low.”He insists that what is important is making decisions on four major issues “which are very basic in terms of disaster management”: the operational capacity of the first responders; the cooperation and coordination among the different forces or the first responders, including bodies such as the IDF Home Front Command and MDA paramedics; the decision as to who is responsible and who is accountable in the field during a disaster; and the creation of a “normative, constitutional structure for the operation of all the elements together in the home front.”Until these four issues are settled, Elran states, “we are making all kinds of incremental, slow and not very significant progress, and the major issues, the major challenges, are the way they were before.”IMMEDIATELY UPON entering the Beit Shemesh fire station where Peretz is based, one can find a dispatch room filled with flat-screens and other newly acquired command- and-control gear.According to the Public Security Ministry, the “Shalhevet” command-and-control system, which the ministry says “manages the Fire and Rescue Service’s operations,” will be installed in all of the country’s fire stations, “as well as the in the aerial firefighting unit and in the Israel Prisons Service. The system will later be installed in the Home Front Command, Jewish National Fund forest services, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.”However, without a centralized authority to make use of this system and properly maintain organizational links both within the fire service and between it and other organizations, the command-and-control system may prove to be worth less than they would be otherwise.Despite his seeming pessimism regarding certain aspects of the government’s reform efforts, Elran says he is “quite optimistic about the tangible little things” such as the procurement of equipment and trucks.However, he is “not very hopeful about the big things.”“It’s important to buy trucks, don’t misunderstand me, it’s important to recruit more people, it’s important to train them properly... all those things are important, but this will not make the major difference,” he says. “It is just level one.”He is adamant that Israel needs “to equate the structure of the firefighters with that of the police department. That’s the essence of the reform.”Peretz, meanwhile, has a sunnier outlook.The Public Security Ministry is a “natural home” for the fire services, he says, “because we and the national police work together and should be under the same ministry.”He expresses confidence that Aharonovitch “will provide well for the fire department.” However, he also agrees that the final, necessary changes to his service will only come once the Knesset passes the bill.While the necessary comprehensive reforms have not yet passed, and much of the funding required for an overhaul of the antiquated Fire and Rescue Services has not yet materialized, it does seem that a great deal has been accomplished. It just may not be enough when Israel faces its next Carmel fire.In the meantime, the country still faces the absurd situation where its youngest firefighters, such as the teenagers at the Bet Shemesh station, are going out into the field with gear many times older than they are themselves… and that isn’t an encouraging sign.