The massive explosion at the weekend near the coast at Herzliya alarmed tens of thousands of people who heard the blast and felt the strong shockwaves.
But there are those for whom the explosion was no surprise: those who have been warning for years against extensive construction in this area without through cleansing and decontamination of the ground. In their eyes, the explosion is another good reason not to implement construction plans for the site, and not just for that one. There are already calls to postpone other huge plans for construction on contaminated land.
Friday’s explosion occurred on what was the Israel Military Industries (IMI) Nof Yam site. The cause of the explosion is still being investigated, but the most up-to-date theory is that it was an accumulation of gases underground, the result of various processes at the IMI factory when it was active on the site. Other assessments speak of large quantities of old gunpowder that for some reason caught fire.
The factory was on land that is part of the site of the Apollonia plan in Herzliya for the construction of 3,000 housing units. The plan started to be promoted in the 2000s and had started to be implemented, but following a further appeal by the Herzliya municipality, the Adam Teva v’Din (Israel Union for Environmental Defense) organization, and others, the matter was again heard in the High Court of Justice, which ordered a halt to the plan.
"The state undertook to complete decontamination of the land by 2019," Adam Teva v’Din said, "but the undertaking was not fulfilled, and meanwhile a plan was promoted to build thousands of homes, where the residents would have been liable to be exposed to risks such as the explosion that occurred at the weekend. That explosion could have been avoided had the state fulfilled its commitment."
The Apollonia plan is not the only one in which thousands of housing units are due to be built on contaminated land. IMI Hasharon is the largest of these in the center of the country: over 35,000 units are planned to be built on the site of a former IMI factory. In Tel Aviv, not far from the Azrieli towers, is the former IMI Magen site, for which 1,100 housing units are planned; at Tel Hashomer, over 10,000 units are planned on land that is extensively contaminated; and in Haifa Bay, a huge plan for some 130,000 housing units is in one of the most heavily contaminated areas in the country.
Voices are now being raised again calling for these plans to be halted. In the wake of Friday’s explosion, Herzliya mayor Moshe Fadlon, one of the main opponents of the Apollonia project, warned of a "ticking bomb" at the site, and Ramat Hasharon mayor Avi Gruber called, not for the first time, for a halt to the IMI Hasharon plan because of irresponsible and dangerous planning, as he puts it, taking place "on top of barrels of explosives."
"We’ve destroyed enough"
Any objection or filing of legal proceedings could delay building plans for these sites for many years.
Decontaminating such heavily contaminated land is not cheap - estimates of the cost of decontaminating the IMI Hasharon site are around NIS 2.3 billion - or quick. Rony Bruell, a real estate appraiser and environmental consultant, says, "Even the simplest rehabilitation will take decades. The brave people who demanded and obtained a further hearing in the High Court of Justice on the Apollonia plan unquestionably saved lives. In my opinion, sites such as Apollonia and IMI Hasharon should not be zoned for housing, or even for commerce or offices. They should remain as open areas, at a much less intensive level. There is no reason to touch these areas; we’ve destroyed them enough."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 25, 2023.
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