IEC fires engineering heads after employees flocked to Eilat conference over stormy weekend

Chairman Yiftach Ron-Tal reports to Knesset c'tee on power failures; most of Israel once again connected to the electricity grid.

By SHARON UDASIN
electricity line old370 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
electricity line old370
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
After some 200 Israel Electric Corporation engineers spent the stormy weekend in the comfort of an Eilat conference, IEC chairman Yiftach Ron Tal announced his intention to fire the department’s bosses on Tuesday morning.
“We informed the heads of the engineering committee of our intention to fire them from their positions in the company,” Ron Tal said.
Ron Tal was addressing members of the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee meeting, in order to provide a preliminary report of the IEC operations that took place throughout the weekend’s storm. In addition to highlighting these activities, the IEC chairman stressed that the actions of the Eilat participants would not be taken lightly, and their behaviors were not representative of the entire company.
“Let’s not take a group of lawand- order-breakers and consider them the norm,” Ron Tal said.
The chairman of the IEC’s workers committee, Miko Tzarfati, slammed the behavior of these employees in comparison to that of the 12,900 workers “who already for several days have not slept and are battling for electricity.”
“I have no doubt that significant discipline of the management is necessary, and that this will be handled very seriously,” Tzarfati said.
Overnight on Monday, electricity once again began to flow to nearly all of the 3,250 households that remained disconnected from the grid due to the weekend’s storm, the IEC said. A few hundred isolated customers, mostly in the Jerusalem area, still remained without electricity, however. The IEC therefore asked that those customers call the company service center at *103 to report any glitches.
Meanwhile, the company distributed and connected 70 temporary generators throughout the country in places where the situation could not be corrected immediately, the IEC said.
“As far as citizens go today, everyone should be connected to electricity, most of them by means of the grid,” Ron Tal said.
“The emergency situation at the company continues. Connection teams are roaming in Jerusalem and in all of the communities, going from house to house and verifying where the electrical problems lie.”