"The whole school was on its feet, children ran in the corridors and cried, the teachers tried to calm them down" • 6 years since the great fire in Haifa

(live here with the great fire) - Exactly today 6 years ago on 24/11/2016, a fire broke out in several centers in Haifa. In the morning, a fire started in the area of ​​the check post, and within a few hours, several neighborhoods in the city were already badly damaged. Throughout the hours of that day, the firefighters worked with tremendous efforts and continuously, moving from house to house and street to street, with the aim of reducing the dimensions of the damage and stopping the stubborn fire.

several centers at the same time

In the end, it turned out that 700 units were damaged, but luckily, there were no casualties. In the weeks after the fire, attempts were made to understand how it happened that a fire broke out in several hotspots throughout the city at the same time, but these did not come up with answers, and to this day we do not actually know if there was any factor responsible Behind the arsons, and if so, who is he?

The Minister of Finance at the time, Moshe Kahlon, who is also a resident of the city, announced that same day that it was arson and that the state would take full responsibility. The result was that the insurance companies could avoid the responsibility to pay for the external damage and the internal contents of the houses. Many of those who kept valuable property in their home and therefore made sure to insure it accordingly, discovered that they could not receive the money from the insurance companies.

The sight of the burnt trees

Kahlon appointed his assistant at the time, also a resident of the city, David Etzioni, who came to the sports hall in Romma and gave an answer to each of the residents whose house was damaged. The Ministry of Finance transferred payments in order to rehabilitate the houses and the municipality took care of an alternative place of residence for those whose houses were damaged. A constructor on behalf of the municipality went through the damaged houses in order to give permission to start the rehabilitation. Some of the houses required more than renovation and actually restoration of the structure or rebuilding.

Along with building the houses, it was also necessary to restore the damaged public space. The mayor at the time, Yona Yahav, along with the municipality's employees, realized that the sight of burned trees throughout the city creates demoralization, so they made sure to bring thousands of trees to the city that were planted along the main thoroughfares. After several months the city looked green again.

Everyone was at work and studying

As I recall, the fire broke out in the morning, it was Thursday, most of the city's residents were at work and the children were at school. The real school Beit Biram was lightly burned and students, teachers and staff were evacuated. A small part of the Romema music school in the Romema neighborhood caught fire. The students and the teaching staff evacuated the place.

"Our house burned down, but what is really important was not damaged"

Neely Keren, a resident of the city, tells Lahi Pa: "Six years ago I worked at Nesher. We live on Zalman Shazar Street in Givat Oranim in the new Rommah, one of the streets that was hit the hardest by the fire. Even when we saw smoke, I still didn't believe that something could happen to my house. Even when I was told that the neighborhood was on fire, I still didn't believe it. I stayed at work and continued to work .

When they came and told me that they were starting to evacuate the children from the schools and kindergartens in the Romema neighborhood, because the fire hit the neighborhood hard, I said fine, I will leave work and go to the children. At that time, I had children in the Reali school and in Romma in the kindergarten next to the Romma school, the flower garden (Tami's garden).

I told myself that it's fine, I'll leave my job in Nesher and go up through Nesher's road to Dania and then to Rommah. I thought that first I would pick up the children from Rieli Beit Biram and then I would arrive at Tami's kindergarten. Everyone said the roads were congested, but Mansher was free. When I started traveling, the children had already been evacuated from school and kindergarten. At that time I had other small children, so there was also a nanny at home, who waited for the children when they returned from school and kindergarten. My nanny immediately came out and took the girl from Tami's shelter. I told the children to go up to the Horv, it seemed to me the best, that they leave the burning neighborhood and we would all meet in the Horv. But I didn't understand the amount of traffic jams and that little by little the whole city was blocked off. I saw that I wouldn't be able to reach Horev, I was just standing in traffic. My older son, who was no longer a school student, was taken down to the beach."

The fireman told us: 'Take what you want and go'

"As soon as I turned left onto Freud, I stood in traffic for 15-20 minutes. The first turn from Freud Street to the right when you go down the road is onto Vitkin Street before the tramway. When I reached the turn onto Vitkin Street, I saw buildings starting to catch fire. I got on the sidewalk and left the car. We started walking towards the center of Carmel. I took keys and phone. My little daughter left her bag in the kindergarten. We walked for more than an hour to the Carmel center, when everyone flocks to the Carmel center.

Even though I saw the city burning and the whole sky was red, I didn't think for a moment that my house would burn. When we arrived at the center of Carmel, we met my husband, who was a doctor in Bnei Zion and joined us. In the evening we arrived in the neighborhood, at first they didn't let us in. Nevertheless, later we entered the house and there were firemen there. The fireman told us: 'Take what you want and go'. There was no light, neither in the neighborhood nor in the house. We went that evening to a hotel in Nahariya."

'We found out that the whole house was burnt and nothing happened'

"The next morning we returned to our house and realized that the house was gone. We threw out the whole house. We shaved all the walls. We brought in a constructor, because when the house is damaged to such a degree, you have to make sure that it can be restored at all. Where we really burned, all the bricks of the wall were exposed. All the electricity and water It had to be redone. The air conditioners melted. The windows exploded. It took us a year and a half to renovate.

Our nanny's son is a firefighter. Our nanny was at home when the fire broke out. Her son ran straight to our house and splashed water on the pines. But it was already too late. He realized that once the pines are already burning, there is not too much to do and he was right.

Lia, Neely's daughter, was 5 years old when the fire broke out, and was in compulsory kindergarten next to Romema school. "I was 5 years old at the time, and I remember that our nanny came to pick us up from kindergarten. We started to go down with her towards Freud, to meet mother. After we met her, we started walking, to get to an area that was far from the fire. I remember that we came back to the house and everything was burnt. On the floor There were burnt toys in the living room. I was very scared for our dog because she inhaled a lot of smoke, but she was saved in the end."

Neely adds and says that it was very difficult to live away from home for such a long period of time: "Buying everything for the children from the beginning was not easy either. We are talking about school equipment, clothes, bedding, for each of the children. The previous mayor, Yona Yahav, took care of us He established the municipality's HML near the school. Sigal Azulai, the previous director of the Romema music school, kept in touch with us after the fire and twice brought us Friday dinner to the apartment we rented. The Reali School provided laptops for the children, everyone in the neighborhood brought us cakes, bedding for the children, anything we needed."

There is no bad without good: 'I learned an important lesson'

If there's one thing I've learned following the fire, it's without a doubt to get help. I was always the one who did for everyone and I never knew how to accept. The fire taught me to do that, I realized that there are situations in life where you have to get help and that doesn't make you weak. We got equipment for the kids, there was simply no other choice.

We moved to an apartment on Shimshon Street, near Vardia. Friends helped us a lot. What also helped us a lot is that Yahav made sure that everyone we need to contact in order to rebuild the house and continue to function, contact us. It saved us a lot of effort. We stayed in a hotel for 3 days and then moved to a rented apartment. I woke up in the morning and my husband came in and said: "We rented an apartment. We are a strong family and we will deal with what happened together", and that's how it was.

For a year and a half we lived outside the neighborhood, on Shimshon Street. On the one hand we ran the family and bought the children everything new and drove them and supported them, and on the other hand I hired a designer and built me ​​the house of my dreams. Our house today is more beautiful than the house we had before the fire and I am not the only one in the neighborhood who took advantage of what happened to us. It's not easy suddenly, in the middle of life, to lose all your possessions and your house, but the bottom line is, what's important to us has been damaged - our family and our love for each other."

'I went into hysteria because I was worried about my little sister'

"I was in the seventh grade at the Alliance school," says Shira, who at the time lived on another street in the Givat Oranim neighborhood. "When the fire broke out in the neighborhood, my younger sister was in the 4th grade and studied at the Romema Nigonun school, inside the neighborhood, and I was at a school outside the neighborhood. My mother and father worked for a while outside of Haifa and were far away when the fire started.

I thought my sister must have left school and started walking home and I was really stressed. I didn't know if there was anyone at home to wait for my sister and if our house was damaged. I cried non-stop, shaking from stress. I was stressed by the thought that my sister might be at home and she wouldn't know there was a fire and then she would only find out when she was home."

"The whole school was on their feet, everyone was running in the corridors and crying. The teachers tried to calm the children down. In the end my uncle who lives close to the school came and took me to him. When I was at his house, my mother called and told us to put channel 10 on the TV. We turned on channel 10 And we saw the fire fighters running down the front porch of our house and entering the house that was all on fire. It was easy to spot the house because we had a plastic basketball hoop in the front yard and they saw it on TV. I was shocked to see the house on fire.

Later my grandmother arrived with my little sister and we went down to the sea to meet our parents. My parents went in the afternoon to see what happened in the house and told us that everything was burnt. We moved in with my grandparents for a few months, while my parents renovated the house. I will never forget coming home and seeing everything I had then black and sooty. All my things were thrown in the trash, it was terrible."