Last update - 00:00 28/11/2006
Three months later, rocket damage barely visible in Kiryat Shmona
By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondent
A little more than three months ago, before the cease-fire in the north took effect, Kiryat Shmona deputy mayor Sami Malul sat in the town's situation room surveying the devastation caused by some 1,000 Katyusha rockets. He figured that the renovations would take close to a year.
This week, one could hardly detect the damage. "It's hard to believe so many rockets landed here," said Malul.
The 12 schools that were damaged were swiftly repaired. "Everyone wanted the school year to begin on time," Malul explained.
Chief municipal engineer David Talbich said the renovators "worked round the clock." The company chosen to repair the schools was Amidar. The money came from the Finance Ministry's compensation fund, whose officials appraised the damage to the schools at NIS 4.125 million.
While the rocket damage was repaired before the school year began, numerous safety hazards in the schools were not, prompting the parents' committee to stop studies last month for a week. Kiryat Shmona's renovation administration and the Education Ministry have since allocated NIS 2.75 million to improve safety in the schools.
Damages to kindergartens were appraised at NIS 1.5 million. Apart from Neot Margalit, which was badly damaged, all kindergartens have been completely repaired.
Damages to municipal public buildings totaled NIS 400,000. Renovations were delayed by three weeks due to bureaucratic red tape in transferring the funds, but work resumed a week and a half ago.
"The rocket damage had almost no effect on the town's routine functioning," said Talbich.
The municipality has begun to renovate infrastructure, though these funds were also held up by red tape. The infrastructure damage includes burst water and sewage pipes, destroyed parks and shelters, broken lights, and smashed walls and pavements. The damage was appraised at NIS 10 million.
"There is still work to be done, like walls about to collapse, pits that opened up and broken pavements. We're waiting for the funds," Talbich said.
Thousands of apartments were damaged, about 50 of them heavily. Most of them have been renovated, as each owner received money from the compensation fund and hired a private contractor to do the job.
"Instead of letting each person deal with the treasury individually, a company should have been set up to carry out the work," argued Talbich.
In some cases, tenants and landlords of damaged houses disagreed with the treasury's damage estimate. In fact, some Katyusha hits are still visible in the town's commercial center, because the property owner disagreed with the appraiser's estimate.
Some 160 tombstones in the town's cemetery were shattered or cracked by rockets. Rabbi Nissim Malka, director of the town's hevra kadisha (burial society), said: "Most tombstones have already been fixed. Others, over graves of people without relations, for which we submitted funding requests, have not been fixed yet." In addition, he said, some families say that they had special gravestones, which cost more than the simple ones, and are therefore demanding more money.