Three meters between life and death

The harrowing account of a 'Yediot Aharonot' photographer who was caught in the Carmel blaze, and of the mother whose daughter he saved.

Jerusalem Post Staff
05 December '10

Three meters. That was the difference between life and death for Prisons Service trainees whose bus was engulfed by fire as it raced to help evacuate Damon Penitentiary inmates when the Carmel forest blaze erupted on Thursday.

Three meters, and the choices made in split seconds amid unimaginable horror.

On Army Radio on Sunday, Ruti Gondani, whose daughter Sigal was one of the handful of the officers on the bus to make it out alive, “met” over the airwaves with Roni Sofer, the Yediot Aharonot photographer who rescued her. And their conversation underlined what Ruti called Sigal’s “miraculous” escape, and the hair’s breadth that separated her daughter from the tragedy that befell almost 40 of her colleagues.

Sofer, who had been out taking photographs all that day, found himself in the Beit Oren area. Looking for fresh angles from which to photograph the spreading blaze, he inadvertently found himself driving into it.

As he drove forward, believing himself to be far from the fire’s focus, he said, his car was being followed by a vehicle from Beit Oren and then by the car driven by Lior Boker, a police officer who was soon to die in the blaze. After a journey of a few hundred meters, said Sofer, the prisons service bus also joined the convoy, followed in turn by the car of Haifa police chief Ahuva Tomer, who is now in critical condition in the hospital having been terribly burned in the blaze.

“The road was completely clear,” said Sofer, but then, seconds later, the winds changed, “and a wall of fire blocked the road… We all reversed.”

(Read full story)

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