Mount Carmel is recovering

Mount Carmel is recovering

  •   One year after the fire
  • 1/18/2012
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    ​Following the worst forest fire in Israel's history, a combination of Mother Nature and human helping hands are turning the Carmel green again. About 18,000 volunteers from Israel and abroad have put in the equivalent of 13,000 workdays to help the Carmel - students, families, soldiers, members of public and private organizations and professional foresters. 
  • The Carmel is turning green once again (Photos: Courtesy KKL-JNF archive)
     
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    • In early December 2010, the worst fire in Israel's history claimed the lives of 44 people, burned more than one third of the Carmel Forest - about five million pine, oak, cypress and pistachio trees and countless plants and creatures - and damaged thousands of homes. Firefighters from Israel and 18 countries finally put out the blaze, which displaced 17,000 people.
       
      One year later, there are signs of life. Winter flowers are blooming in the charred areas, and new undergrowth is coloring the landscape green again as the trees slowly regenerate. The University of Haifa has given scholarships to 44 students in memory of each victim of the disaster, in return for a commitment to actively perpetuate his or her memory.
       
      Aerial view of the December 2010 fire
      Aerial view of the December 2010 fire
       
      These small steps are significant. But the human and natural damage from the massive fire started by a couple of careless teens will be a long process, says Michael Weinberger, regional director of Keren Kayemeth LeYisrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), The KKL-JNF aids the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) in caring for the forest.
       
      A large-scale rehabilitation effort began right away. Just a week after the smoke cleared, ambassadors from 21 countries, and a representative of the Palestinian Authority, planted saplings in the Carmel - the only Israeli biosphere reserve designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
       
      Over the following 12 months, a committee of government officials, INPA environmental experts, scholars and KKL-JNF representatives oversaw the planting of about a million additional trees in public areas of the scorched reserve. Forest rangers and volunteers carefully monitored the rest of the forest as they let nature do most of the rehab. They felled and removed badly burned trees, repaired terraces and began creating 50 acres of firebreaks - tree-free barrier areas to slow or stop a wildfire.
       
      Donations poured into regional KKL-JNF offices toward purchasing fire trucks, firefighting equipment and early warning systems, and to finance restoration projects and new bicycle paths and hiking trails, as well as a Volunteer Center where the volunteers can meet or stay for the night. The KKL-JNF Tourism Department even created a new Forester for a Day program as a result of the Carmel fire.
       
      According to the KKL-JNF, about 18,000 volunteers from Israel and abroad have put in the equivalent of 13,000 workdays to help the Carmel - students, families, soldiers, members of public and private organizations and professional foresters. The youngest volunteers were about 50 fifth- and sixth-graders from the Yagel Yaakov School in Paris.
       
      Volunteers from around the world are helping to clear dead wood and thin new pine tree growth.
      Volunteers from around the world are helping to clear dead wood and thin new pine tree growth.
       
      The volunteers have been repairing tourist and recreational sites and helping to thin new trees to lessen the competition for scarce water and encourage biodiversity. The objective is to decrease the organic material in the forest by a third, in order to reduce the damage fires cause by slowing the spread of the flames.
       
      Communities of the Carmel
       
      The KKL-JNF is repairing and improving the access roads to the Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze residential communities of the 80-square-mile Carmel region. In case of a similar disaster in the future, the roads will ensure that seven new fire trucks - bought with contributions from the United States, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France - will more easily be able to reach residential areas so that fewer people will have to flee their homes.
       
      Among the most badly burned properties was the youth village Yemin Orde. Children and staff members and their families were evacuated to a nearby town before the fire caused an estimated $21 million in damages. In the past year, new electrical and plumbing systems, homes and offices, landscaping and library have been installed with the help of insurance money, $7.5 million from US donors and $2.8 million from the Israeli government. The next project is a new road system expected to begin in the spring of 2012.​

      Kibbutz Beit Oren is another of the affected areas. The kibbutz hotel is up and running, but residents whose houses were badly damaged are living in temporary quarters while new homes are built.

      Dan Ben-Arye, a spokesman for the Ein Hod artist colony in the Carmel, says that 17 of the 150 member families were burned out of their houses. "The families have not yet been compensated and we're trying to organize alternative places for them to live and work," he says, adding that "their talent wasn't burned, so they keep working and producing."

      Though the tourist areas of Ein Hod were back in business two days after the fire, Ben-Arye says visitors and organized tours have been staying away in the mistaken belief that the whole place had burned down. He's been releasing photos and videos to the media trying to show that the artist colony is up and running.​

     
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    ​Ein Hod isn't the only area to be suffering from a fire-related public relations problem. Because the blaze started in the Druze village of Usfiya, many Carmel region residents blame the Druze people and assume they do not care about their natural surroundings, but that's not true, says Prof. Ido Izhaki, director of the Mount Carmel Research Center at the University of Haifa.

    Last May, the center arranged a day-long session of lectures and workshops bringing together residents and mayors of the Druze villages with personnel from INPA and the KKL-JNF. "It was an academic symposium but it was very emotional, so much so that sometimes I had to ask people to keep their voices down," says Izhaki. "It seems there is a big gap between the authorities and the locals, and we have to do something. We want to research new ways to help the Druze understand how they can benefit financially from the biosphere by establishing new businesses based on nature but sensitive to the ecology. They feel the biosphere was forced on them, and we want to show them how it is really to their benefit."


    Learning and discovery after the fire

    Izhaki says the Carmel Research Center also wants to research the effects of repeated fires, because this is hardly the first time the Carmel range has been burned - though it was the worst.

    "We have a good study done after 1989 [Carmel] fire, so we understand the resilience after one fire, but fires in the Carmel are frequent and the intensity is high," says Izhaki. "Some places in the forest have been burned five times since 1989, and we're sure the effect is different from the previous study. Fires are not so bad ecologically - once in 20 years actually helps biodiversity - but once in six years is different."

    Doctoral student Naama Tessler was especially interested to see how the previously burned plots of land she'd already surveyed before the fire were affected. "Vegetation changes after a fire," she says. "The vegetation community and soil properties can be different, for instance in how well the soil absorbs water. I don't really know the effect yet. We will have to wait a few years."

    Thus far, however, Izhaki hasn't gotten funding to do these studies. The government pledged NIS 55 million toward rehabilitating the Carmel but much of this money has yet to be released. One resulting problem of the lack of cash, according to the INPA, is that thinning efforts haven't kept apace with the rapid regrowth of pine trees, which flourish after a fire but are less desirable because of their flammability.


    Silver linings

    The catastrophic cloud of the 2010 Carmel fire does have some silver linings. During its post-fire investigations, KKL-JNF foresters discovered ancient agricultural terraces that had previously been concealed by the dense underbrush. So now there is an initiative to develop a grove of fruit trees on these reconstructed terraces. "We found small, new olive trees here this summer, growing from tree roots that survived, so we decided to plant a grove of fruit trees with carobs, figs and pomegranates, and restore the landscape as it apparently once was," said forester Micha Silko.

    Ben Rosenberg, INPA's ecologist for the Carmel Region and manager of its Hai-Bar Carmel animal sanctuary and breeding center, says the fire changes animal habitats, sometimes for the better. The open spaces are beneficial to the raptors and gazelles Hai-Bar releases into to the wild. "Raptors like falcons and eagles and some of the buzzards hunt in open areas," he explains. "Vultures feed on carcasses, so it's easier for them to spot them in open areas." This is one reason he wants to make sure the rapidly regrowing pines are kept thinned.

    The flames on December 3, 2010 had come close to engulfing Hai-Bar, but staff and volunteers succeeded in averting tragedy. "We took all the birds out to the Ramat Hanadiv nature reserve near Zichron Yaakov. Our two vulture cages were burned but were rebuilt immediately so we could bring all the raptors back. The deer and gazelles stayed in their enclosures and they were safe, although they were stressed," Rosenberg reports. The sanctuary is still in the process of repairing fire-damaged fencing.

    As for the creatures of the forest, Rosenberg says it's difficult to assess how many were lost. His staff is doing a nocturnal survey of a 21-kilometer area of the forest. "We don't really know how the animals are recovering," he admits. "But we believe the jackal and wild boar populations will come back to normal quite quickly."​