The Knesset Labor, Welfare and Health Committee will hold an emergency session this Thursday in the wake of the collapse of the carpark under construction in Ramat Hahayal, Tel Aviv yesterday, in which three workers were killed and others are believed still trapped in the ruins. Several government agencies have been summoned to the hearing, as well as the developer Africa-Israel Investments Ltd. (TASE:AFIL) and its subsidiary Danya Cebus, which is the contractor on the building site.
The rescue services continue to seek those missing at the site of the accident. The cause of the structure's collapse is still unknown. The police have begun investigating the incident, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in the Ministry of Economy and Industry is also examining what went wrong. At present, it is a mystery how a complex engineering project that was due to be completed shortly could collapse at such an advanced stage.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration reports that the site was under its supervision, and that its officials made a field inspection in June and reported that here were no safety defects and that the project was in the final stages of construction.
"Globes" recently reported the state's failures in supervision in relation to work accidents in the construction industry. There have been dozens of fatalities and over a hundred serious injuries at construction sites supervised by eighteen authorized inspectors; that is eighteen inspectors for some 13,000 construction sites. In this case, however, the collapse of the carpark apparently stemmed from a design or engineering failure, and not a site safety defect, but the state's attitude to safety can be seen as an indicator of the way other aspects of the construction industry are dealt with.
The report of the Zeiler committee that investigated the collapse of the floor in the Versailles wedding hall in Jerusalem in 2001, in which 23 were killed and nearly 400 injured, contained a series of recommendations on control and inspection of construction projects, but even today, years later, things are still run the same way. There is still no obligation on a developer to employ a supervisor on a building site to supervise the contractor, and construction sites still operate without appropriate controls.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 6, 2016
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