Michaeli Blames Netanyahu for Tel Aviv Sinkhole

By Yisrael Price

YERUSALAYIM — It wasn’t long before the sinkhole that opened up in Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway on Shabbos became a political issue.

On Sunday, Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli, the head of the Labor party,  blamed former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for sinkholes, both literal and figurative, throughout Israeli society:

“The sinkhole in Ayalon is a small example of the failed management of the Netanyahu governments. Sinkholes in every area. In the housing crisis, in crime in Arab society, in education, in the crumbling infrastructure. This is the legacy they left. In every office we went to, we discovered rot and continuous failures underneath. We are fixing this,” Michaeli declared.

However, the cause of the sinkhole in Tel Aviv may not be due to prior governmental rot, according to Dr. Roni Kamai, an expert on ground vibrations and infrastructure who is a member of the Engineering Faculty at Ben Gurion University, who pointed to a more specific and recent possible cause:

“The sinkhole that opened yesterday was most probably due to an engineering project that upset the equilibrium in the subsoil, disrupting the flow of water underground. Such sinkholes, unlike naturally occurring ones, are due to human intervention and are entirely preventable,” he told Arutz Sheva on Sunday.

“Any reputable engineer is aware of this issue and in every construction project, a person must be employed whose speciality it is to ensure the stability of the structure and the surrounding area. In the Tel Aviv area, construction work is constantly ongoing, with tall and complex buildings being erected, and such events are rare,” she added.

“Today we have technologies that allow us to check, without drilling, whether there are gaps in the subsoil, and I know that in this case, teams worked throughout the night in an effort to detect any additional problems. I hope that all the necessary tests will continue to be conducted,” Dr. Kamai said. “It is vital to keep one’s finger on the pulse.”

Regarding the plugging of the sinkhole with concrete, she said: “Filling a hole with concrete is a band-aid that enables a road to be quickly reopened, and it does not treat the cause of the incident. I hope that the teams working in the field identified the cause of the collapse and treated it before filling the hole with concrete. Otherwise, if there is still a flow of water underground, the subsoil will continue to drift and problems will reoccur.”

Traffic was disrupted in Tel Aviv on Sunday morning after the sinkhole opened on the Ayalon Highway.

The pit, which spanned one of the highway’s southward lanes, prompted authorities to close a number of lanes and the nearby exit.

B’chasdei shamayim, no injuries were reported as the incident occurred on Shabbos when there is less traffic on the roads.

By late Sunday morning, traffic in the four nearby lanes resumed. It is unclear when the area where the sinkhole itself had opened would reopen to traffic.