Failure to implement decision passed more than 13 years ago ‘endangers both lives and property,’ the state comptroller said in a report published Monday
Zafrir Rinat. Jul 23, 2024
Thirteen years after the government decided to protect the cliffs along the Mediterranean coast against the danger of collapse, most of them cliffs at risk still haven’t been protected from either the land side or the sea side, a new state comptroller’s report found.
The fact that this work hasn’t been done endangers both lives and property, reduces the amount of beach available for swimming and makes it harder to swim safely, added the report, which was included in an annual audit of local governments that was released on Tuesday.
After some sections of the cliff began crumbling – mainly along natural sand beaches that had shrunk, making the cliffs vulnerable to erosion by the waves – the government decided to form a government company to preside over protecting the cliffs against erosion in several places, including Herzliya, Ashkelon and Netanya. But the actual work was supposed to be done by the municipalities. The requisite actions included building various kinds of breakwaters, adding artificial sand to the beaches, and building supporting walls or rock embankments.
But as of last summer, the report said, work from the sea side had been done only along 13 kilometers of coastline. And on the land side, work had been done on only 14 of the 27 stretches slated for protection.
One of the main reasons for this failure was the lack of dedicated funding for the work, which is expected to cost around 670 million shekels ($185 million). Various government ministries fought over which of them should be responsible for funding the project, and they still hadn’t reached an agreement as of when the report was written.
Consequently, only 20 percent of this amount has so far been delivered to the municipalities. And even that money hasn’t all been used yet.
Herzliya, for instance, hasn’t yet finished planning the work, much less implementing it. In Ashkelon, the municipality failed to correct flaws founded by a previous comptroller’s report in 2020, such as the absence of fencing, warning signs and a system to drain rainwater from the top of the cliff. The drainage is necessary to keep the soil from being washed away, since that undermines the cliff’s stability.
Moreover, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority didn’t do its job of protecting the cliffs located in two national parks, Ashkelon and Apollonia.
Another significant risk factor is the expected rise in sea levels due to the climate crisis. The reported noted that the government company had hired a consulting firm to prepare recommendations on how to deal with this risk, and the report was duly passed on to the Environmental Protection Ministry and the government’s Climate Change Adaptation Administration. But as of when the report was written, neither body had yet done anything about those recommendations.
Nevertheless, the comptroller did find some improvements since his last report. For instance, he said, the government company is now spending more of its budget rather than sitting on the money, and it has begun looking into new technologies that could protect the cliffs from the sea with less of an environmental impact.