Neot HaKikar disaster

Neot HaKikar disaster (Hebrew: אסון נאות הכיכר) which occurred in Israeli on 30 December 1970 was at that point in time the worst natural disaster in Israel since the founding of the State of Israel until the Mount Carmel forest fire of 2010. During the event a rock detached from a cliff due to heavy rains and crushed an IDF military base dining room. Twenty Israelis were killed in the disaster (19 soldiers and one civilian) and ten soldiers were injured (three of them severely).^[1]

The accident and rescue operations

On Wednesday, 30 December 1970, at 12:15, part of a 12-meter-high cliff suddenly detached and hit an IDF military base kitchen. Soon after that the whole cliff detached and crushed the IDF military base dining room while the soldiers at the base were having lunch.

The soldiers whom were outside of the dining room quickly called for assistance, and in less than an hour the first Air Force Helicopter landed in the army base with a medical team.

The removal of rocks which crushed the cabin (which were about three meters in height and around five meters in width) was only possible with heavy mechanical equipment. Initially, the heavy mechanical equipment arrived from the nearby Dead Sea Works potash plant, and later heavy mechanical equipment was also sent from the Combat Engineering Corps.

The rescue operations continued uninterrupted during night time. By midnight all of the injured and the dead, whom were buried underneath 1,500 tons of rock and soil, were recovered.

References

1. ^ [1]