From Dan Kohn, Kibbutz Adamit
The news is still full of Lebanon related articles. It is still the subject that everyone talks about. People are still nervous. There was a false alarm in Kiryat Shmonah that sent people rushing to shelters in panic. Nobody was surprised. Everyone expects something to happen . . . round two of the fight between the forces of “good” and “evil”. The conflict does not have an official name, as a war should. People are referring to it as the Second Lebanon War. Usually names are given to wars by the military. The media has given this name. Was it a war or a battle or just a large exercise or conflict? The fact that the military did not name the ‘war' may show that the army never expected the conflict to reach such epic proportions. Something will happen and it will be soon. My prophecy is October or June. There are reasons why all of Israel's conflicts start in those months. After October there are winter conditions. Guy says that wars start in June to screw the students but there are objective reasons. This conflict started on July 12 th but nobody is sure that it's a war. There is a consensus that the present situation cannot continue and if Hizballah is ignored it will come back stronger than ever Fire-fighting is one story of heroism that has hardly been mentioned. Katusha rockets ignited hundreds of fires. The majority landed, fortunately, in open areas. A large percentage started fires. There were trucks, fire fighters and equipment from the center of Israel. Ramat Gan sent a fire truck and crew to our neck of the woods. Fires started everywhere from Metulla in the north to the Gilboa mountain range in the south and all had to be extinguished. Unfortunately most fires did not start in locations with plentiful fire hydrants but in the hills and valleys and burned while Hizballah was shelling the areas. The main tool to combat these fires was the “Chim-Nir” airplanes. The pilots and planes were amazing. You have to imagine the scene in the Upper Galilee where the largest number of Katusha rockets landed and many fires were started every day. At its center is the Hula Valley a virtually level basin. At seventy meters above sea level it is the largest level area in Israel. Surrounding this basin are the Naftali mountains to the west along the border with Lebanon. Most of the fires were on this mountainous range. To the east is the Golan Heights raising a thousand meters above the Hula Valley and the Iyun Valley in Lebanon is 400 meters above the Hula to the north. The Upper Galilee burned with fires all over. On most days there was a layer of smoke floating above the valley. Add to this picture the constant noise of artillery; sirens sounding alarms and the anxiety of a rocket landing nearby and you have an picture of life in the Galilee last month. With everything mentioned above there were also bright yellow planes whizzing above the fires and dropping orange fire repressing chemicals on fires that could not be extinguished in any other way. These were planes of the Chim-Nir aviation company, a company established by the kibbutz movement in the early fifties to spray agricultural fields. It has long ceased to belong to the kibbutz movement. It was originally sold to the pilots and today is a public company with shares sold on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. For a long time it has been the sole company with a contract to fight fires. Last month the Chim-Nir pilots were reminded of combat conditions as they joined the effort to protect Northern Israel. They flew out of the very small Rosh Pinah airport that was closed to civil aviation since Katusha rockets had landed nearby. There were over eighty flights taking off on an average day. Pilots were flying continuously from morning till evening. An average flight lasted about twenty minutes then would land, be refilled and take off. I saw four planes coming in one after another and taking off immediately. The requests to combat a fire came from Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Fire Department and now there were requests from the army. There was one plane that stayed in the air and patrolled constantly. That plane could redirect planes from one fire to another and frequently did so when fires threatened communities and army bases. From Adamit I witnessed a fire that burned for a long time in Southern Lebanon and a plane came to extinguish it when it endangered an army base on the border. A few days later there was a large fire around Moshav Ya'ara (beneath Adamit) after it was shelled and two planes came to combat the flames and they did their job promptly as the fire came close to the moshav houses. The difficulty of fire fighting from a plane is to approach the flames that are often on a slope and get close enough to place the chemicals effectively. There are updrafts, wind shear and other problems and the pilots of these small one-engine planes need to be cautious dare-devils at the same time. They also have to deal with Israeli artillery that was firing shells over the fires into Lebanon. There were also incoming rockets and there was no way that they could be taken into consideration. There are often several planes combating a fire simultaneously. A number of planes would be sent to extinguish a fire that endangered a community or army base. Pilots' work could suddenly become very intense. I visited the Rosh Pinah airport with a reporter and photographer. We were able to interview Eitan Shtarkman, CEO and a couple of the pilots and view the operation. The highlight was when the photographer received permission to join and photograph one of the flights. There is only one two-seater fire fighting aircraft and up he went and photographed some amazing pictures. I was jealous when I saw the photographer heading for the plane with a plastic bag. The pilot was positive that his passenger would need the bag when the plane maneuvered and didn't want his aircraft soiled. I have a lot of admiration for these fire-fighters (and for the photographer who did not use his bag and shot beautiful pictures under difficult conditions).
Dan Kohn, Kibbutz Adamit, August 20, 2006