August 13, 2006
Dear Friends,
I wrote a brief note on Friday, to tell everyone that I'm OK, in case they saw my building on television. In fact, only a few minutes later, the building was shown on TV, on the 5:00 p.m. news program; my phone didn't stop ringing for hours.
I was about to get ready to leave the house anyway, when I heard the whoosh of a Katyusha, the loudest crash I'd ever heard, and the building literally bounced. My apartment, on the 13th floor of the "14 storey building" faces east, with one window on the north; I looked down from there, to see if the building had been hit on that side, and it hadn't. When I got out into the hallway, I heard lots of voices on the stairs, or on the floors below. Although the elevators were working, I decided to walk down, and see what was going on. I walked onto each floor from the stairwell.
When I got to the ninth floor, I did the same, and noticed some drops of blood on the floor in front of the south-west apartment. At the same time, someone was hollering from inside the apartment, "Is anybody there?" When I answered, he asked me to try to push open the door from the outside, he couldn't get it open. I pushed and even kicked it, but couldn't get it open. I told him to wait, and I'd get help; he seemed calm enough. I went to the stairwell, and called down for help. Immediately, a policeman appeared, and spoke to the man inside, who answered him. The policeman tried to kick the door open, with no success, and ran and got the firemen who were in the building. No one could figure out how the man was trapped inside, because obviously, whoever had been hurt had left from that door. I surmised that whoever it was had gone in and the door slammed behind them. The firemen started working on cutting the door open. The door is what is known as a multi-bolt door: it's metal, with bolts that go into the frame on all four sides of the door. They kept trying to call to the man inside, but now there was no answer, and faces were looking very worried. Several firemen asked me if I was sure I'd heard someone there, but the policeman interceded and said that, "Yes, there was someone there", and he had spoken to him, we both had. Of course, a crowd of neighbors had collected. One was Ella's husband from the 10th floor, who ran back upstairs. A few moments later, Ella came down with the key - just in time; they were close to breaking in. But there was no one there! He'd been rescued by the fire truck, which reached him through the living room window. I had a glimpse of destruction, with the windows and shutters shattered, and glass all over, before the door was closed and locked again.
I had a passing thought of a funny incident that occurred last summer: I'd been sitting at the computer, which is near the window, and heard voices very close. Now, sound does travel up, and I sometimes hear sounds from the street, but this sounded like someone was talking into a telephone or walkie-talkie, extremely close to the window. I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a man loomed up next to my window! I don't know which one of us was more startled upon seeing the other. I chatted with him and offered him a cold drink. Turned out that he was a fireman, and after a minor fire in a 3rd floor apartment, the fire department had decided to practice reaching the upper floors, "just in case". Now, I thought how lucky it was that the firemen had practiced reaching the upper floors of our building, the tallest in Kiryat Shmona, when they did.
At that point, one of the firemen I knew asked about the other residents of the building, in the floors above the ninth. He and I went up again, floor by floor, to make sure no one else was trapped in their apartments. I pointed out which residents had already left, and which apartments still had people living in them, and we knocked on those doors. By that time, all the residents were downstairs, milling around in the lobby.
I went to the 10th floor, to Ella's apartment. It was a shambles. Every day, I had warned them not to close the windows all the way. However, her husband had come home from work, turned on the air conditioner, and closed the windows. Then he sat down in the living room to read the paper, after having just stepped out of the kitchen. All the living room windows were knocked out; I don't understand how he wasn't seriously injured by flying glass. All he had was a small cut on his arm. The kitchen was in worse shape. They'd had a huge window in there, which was completely blown out, frame, glass, even bits of plaster, and all. Here, it wasn't just the force of the shock wave, as it had been in the living room, but shrapnel as well. Pieces of shrapnel and glass were embedded in the wall above the cabinets. Another piece had evidently struck the mechanism of the refrigerator, because it had stopped working. The sink had been dislodged from the surrounding countertop, and was tilting at an angle. All in all, though, they were uninjured. Her father had been lying in bed, in the far bedroom (facing the southern niche) and so hadn't been hurt, either.
I left her and went downstairs. Most of the other neighbors were milling around; one family was in hysterics. I had met them only a few hours earlier, when I came home. The siren had gone off, and they had run to the stairwell, which is very secure. Now, some of their windows had been blasted in, and they were totally in shock. Several people noted how many people had stayed in the building; I would estimate that one-third of the residents were still there, which seems to be typical of the town as a whole.
The building is shaped roughly as below (my artistic abilities are nil Note from Daisyima: the drawing did not come over in the posting); there are four apartments on a floor, each identical. Each apartment has 3-way ventilation. (One of the jokes here is that Nasrallah is trying to improve living conditions by giving everyone cross-ventilation.) Most windows face one direction, one window in the next direction going counter-clockwise, and the third, continuing counter-clockwise, facing into the "niche" . The inner part of the niche is the kitchen window. So, for example, my windows mostly face east, with another window facing north, and the one facing the niche actually facing west, but blocked by the other side of the niche. My kitchen window faces east as well, but is on the inner side of the niche. Hope this isn't too confusing.
What had happened is that the Katyusha hit inside the niche, which amplified the effect. All, or almost all, of the kitchens facing west, i.e. the lower left quadrant of the figure above, were damaged, from at least the 3rd floor to at least the 13th. That is, the kitchen windows were blown in, with glass and possibly shrapnel inside. I don't know about above and below that, because people weren't home, and I couldn't tell from outside. Most of the apartments which have one window facing into the niche, i.e. the north facing ones, were also damaged. Even with the windows open, the force of the blast blew them off their frames, and there's glass everywhere.
People keep asking me about the building itself, the electricity, the elevators, etc. There was no real structural damage: apartments like Ella's, and Riki's below hers, had a lot of glass, wood and plastic damage, even perhaps a cinderblock or two dislodged, and plaster knocked off the concrete. However, despite the jokes, e.g. Nasrallah wants everyone in Kiryat Shmona to have a single-storey house, the Katyusha is not like a bomb dropped from a plane, or even the size and strength of those that have fallen in Haifa, which seriously damage buildings and infrastructure. The Katyusha is actually an anti-personnel weapon. Because it's sent over with tremendous force, and has so much explosives packed into it, it can and does do damage to structures. But that damage is usually a hole where it penetrated, and whatever it wrecks inside. It usually does not do structural damage, and certainly not in modern, strongly-built buildings like mine.
Getting back to what happened that evening, I again started leaving the building, and ran into David T. coming in. David is an engineer, who has been assigned by the municipality to check on physical damage, and authorize evacuation for those people whose homes and apartments have been damaged to the point where they can't stay there. First, he was waylaid by a neighbor downstairs, who said that water was leaking from the 7th floor down, in the southwest quadrant. He then asked me who lived where, what apartments were affected. We ended up coming back up to my apartment, where I printed out a list of the residents I had on my computer, having once been the treasurer of the building committee. We went over the list, and I explained which apartments were damaged and which people needed to be evacuated. Before he was finished, he got a call to run to the next site that had been hit. A little later, when I discovered that two families weren't listed, I called David, and he was already at the third site. Among those whose names I gave him was Ella and her family.
I finally left, about an hour after I originally planned to leave. In all of this going up and down, I was still holding a container of cat food to put out, and eventually I did so - luckily. I was in time for one of the most moving moments of the day. A family from the Eshkol neighborhood, where I volunteer, and with whom I'd been in contact, knew that I lived in the 14 storey building, but didn't have my phone number. So, they hopped in their car to come over and see if they could find me, to make sure I was OK! We met in the parking lot. As I say, I was very touched.
Of course, my phone didn't stop ringing from the moment the building was shown on TV, about 15 minutes after it was hit. All my friends, from near and far, wanted to make sure that I was OK. Every time I completed one phone call, there were 2 or 3 messages waiting. It's wonderful to know that so many people care.
After eating dinner out - far away from town - I returned. Two families were downstairs, waiting to be picked up, and taken to their temporary homes away from Kiryat Shmona, although they didn't know where. But Ella and her family hadn't been picked up. I went upstairs to her apartment, and called David from there. Turns out he'd had the wrong phone number: Ella's brother-in-law, Peter, lives in the building, too. They had gone to relatives for the duration, and David had mistakenly gotten Peter's number from information, and kept calling Peter's empty apartment. By the time I was able to put Ella and David into direct contact, it was too late to do anything. Ella and her husband had already cleaned up most of the broken glass, and they ended up spending the entire weekend in the apartment, with no windows. When I left this morning, they were waiting for a call about their evacuation. They'd received a call from the tax authorities, telling them that the damage in their apartment was too extensive for a regular temporary solution. A longer-term solution, close enough for them to continue going to work even after the war is over, was being sought. In the meantime, all they could do was wait. [By this evening, they were gone, and I'll try to call her tomorrow and get details.]
I had another full and interesting day at the moked today, but details of that will have to wait until tomorrow's update.
Until then, have a quiet and peaceful night,
Marsh
