State-owned pipeline fined NIS 1.6 million over 2011 spills in Zin stream

The Beersheba Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday fined the Europe Asia Pipeline Company NIS 1.6 million (around $486,000) for polluting the Zin stream in southern Israel on a pair of separate occasions in 2011.

The court also fined a number of former senior officials at the state-owned firm, formerly known as the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline company, including former EAPC director-general Yair Vida, who was ordered to pay NIS 75,000 (over $22,00).

Judge Sarah Haviv ruled that “the nature of the damages and their extent constitute a broad violation of protected values at a relatively high level of severity,” but noted that the officials “are not directly responsible for the damage to the pipeline.”

Eli Ben Ari, legal advisor for the Adam Teva V’Din environmental justice group, slammed the court’s decision, saying the punishment was “too lenient.”

“The penalty for responsibility in such serious contamination cases for senior executives in polluting companies must be such that any future manager will not dare to save on expenses aimed at preventing such incidents,” he said. “Therefore not only heavy fines are required but also actual imprisonment in cases such as this.”

In February, the court convicted EAPC and the former officials over the pollution in the Zin stream, which was badly damaged by the leaks. The stream is a seasonal river that runs 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the Ramon Crater to the Sodom plain, then into the southern end of the Dead Sea.

The first of the two leaks took place during maintenance work on a pipe in June 2011 while a worker was trying to dig up a tree for relocation and hit the pipe, causing 722 cubic meters (190 gallons) of jet fuel to spew out and contaminate an area of 60 dunams (15 acres) within and around the Zin Stream for more than five hours.

Yellow water seen in the Zin stream in southern Israel’s Negev Desert. (Roi Galili)

Around 100 cubic meters (26 gallons) of kerosene were pumped out in an emergency operation and 26,500 tons of polluted soil were subsequently removed. However, Judge Haviv at the time ruled that the stream, and its banks remained contaminated in a way that endangered the aquifer beneath the stream as well as water drilling some 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away. The event damaged flora and fauna and left a noxious smell for several months.

According to the judgment, the EAPC failed to ensure compliance with technical specifications and the details of a work order it had written itself. Furthermore, it was ill-prepared for a leak. Vida was insufficiently involved in supervising the project.

The Environmental Protection Ministry issued a stop-work order, only allowing the resumption of works on July 27 that year, subject to various conditions, including one that the pipe be buried under a meter (just over three feet) of soil once maintenance had been carried out.

Despite this, on September 4, 2011, a digger working on restoring an adjacent path punched two new holes in the reburied pipe, sending several hundred more million cubic meters of kerosene into the streambed, the indictment said.

Attempts to stop the flow were hampered by the fact that workers had left the valve key in an office, according to the charge sheet.

The workers violated regulations as well as the terms of work submitted by EAPC to the Environmental Protection Ministry, the judgment said.

Once again, according to the judge, the company was not properly prepared for an emergency.

Oil spill in Evrona, southern Israel, December 5, 2014. (Noam Weiss, Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The state-owned company has been under scrutiny over its environmental record amid a push for a deal to transport more oil from the UAE overland between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

The company has also been indicted over a 2014 oil spill — called the worst in Israel’s history — that caused massive damage to the Evrona Nature Reserve and Arava Desert.

EAPC subsequently agreed to pay NIS 100 million ($28 million) in damages for that event.