Egozi’s Fury

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Israel, 2014: Chaos and criminal negligence, where government offices ignore their own failures even if they lead to our deaths.

It keeps happening. There’s an government office in charge, but everyone there ignores their duty – and people die. For a couple of days afterward people discuss it and then it’s back to normal. This isn’t how an advanced western state is supposed to act.

Someone should have paid the price for Israel’s cooking gas fiascoes a long time ago, but it never happened and it won’t happen this time as well. Everything here is done offhand, with the only purpose being giving ranks and positions to the most unqualified people. The investigation into the Jerusalem disaster is ongoing, but it’s obvious that the background situations should have been taken care of a long time ago. It’s also obvious that the situation isn’t actually going to change.

According to the Fire Fighting Authority database there were around 8800 safety incidents involving cooking gas in the years 2009-2012, with some incidents leading to property damage, injuries and deaths. 4752 incidents took place in 2012 alone. According to a report in Haaretz a state comptroller report mentioned the Energy Ministry records only showing 192 safety incidents in 2012, as its definition of “incident” is different than that of the Fire Fighting Authority.

The Energy Ministry, according to the report, didn’t enforce the cooking gas supplier’s duty to conduct periodically inspect their installations. In addition, records in the Energy Ministry, the Economy Ministry and the Environmental Protection Ministry contain only partial information about the locations of 40,000 cooking gas containers installed all over Israel. “Government offices do not require cooking gas suppliers to share that information, and therefore no official state authority is in charge of conducting safety inspections,” this according to the State Comptroller’s report.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The State Comptroller’s report specifically mentioned the situation in Jerusalem. A letter by a city council member to the General Director of the Economy Ministry, sent in 2012, mentioned that the municipality “has no accurate list containing the locations of cooking gas containers installed prior to 2003.” The council member added that “According to rough estimates there are more than 5,000 cooking gas containers illegally installed throughout the city.”

According to the Haaretz report the Energy Ministry still haven’t completed the approval process for gas supplier certification regulations, even 23 years after the relevant laws went into effect. Even the regulations that were approved were never implemented. In May 2009, for example, the police gave the former director of the ministry’s safety division a list with the names of 53 technicians who used false certifications. The director never checked to see if their license should be revoked, and even extended the licenses of six of them by three additional years.

It would be pointless to include the responses of the relevant government offices. They’re simply childish, shifting the blame onto someone else and containing nothing of value. Neglect is king in Israel, our ministers look good on TV but their offices are doing nothing. The next disaster is just around the corner.