More than two months after a gaping sinkhole mysteriously opened in the parking lot of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, investigations of the incident are still ongoing.
In early June, frightening video footage showed a giant sinkhole open up suddenly in the hospital parking lot, swallowing three cars with no warning. Seven cars were damaged in the incident, but nobody was hurt.
Netivei Israel–National Transport Infrastructure Company has fixed the hole and restored the parking lot, and it is continuing to examine the cause of the incident, company officials told The Jerusalem Post.
There have been concerns that the problem may be connected to the nearby tunneling work for Highway 16, which is being built by Netivei Israel to provide an additional entrance to the city through the Motza interchange, and is expected to open in 2023.
The road includes several kilometers of tunnels stretching from the Har Nof neighborhood down Shmuel Beyth Street toward the Givat Mordechai intersection. The tunnel runs directly underneath the area of the hospital.
Netivei Israel rejected any suggestion that the construction had caused the sinkhole.
“We are doing the reinforcements and repairs because that is what was agreed to with the hospital,” a company spokesman said. “There is no connection to the investigation into the sinkhole’s cause. There is also a separate issue regarding water from the Gihon water company that had permeated the ground due to insufficient drainage. It is also possible that we will never know the cause.”
“We are exercising responsibility by repairing the hole,” he said. “Responsibility is not guilt.”
Some have expressed concern that the collapse could prove to be the tip of the iceberg of a series of impending sinkholes linked to the construction. The tunnels also run underneath the nearby training field used by the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.
A broad look at Jerusalem infrastructure projects under construction will appear in Friday’s edition of the Post.