Maccabiah Bridge Collapse - Initial Investigations

Initial Investigations

Israel's deputy minister of education, Moshe Peled, immediately convened a public commission, chaired by Yishai Dotan, to investigate the collapse. Israeli police also conducted their own investigation. The Dotan Commission released its findings on the 23rd of July, 1997. The commission found that the Maccabiah Games' organising committee, led by Yoram Eyal, had departed from the usual practice of paying the Israeli army to construct the bridge. Instead, in an apparent effort to reduce costs, Eyal contracted with a company called Irgunit, headed by Adam Mishori, to construct the bridge. Irgunit's traditional business was the construction of props and stage sets for theatre productions. The company had never designed nor built a bridge.

Irgunit sub-contracted the bridge's construction to Baruch Karagula and Yehoshua Ben-Ezra (also known as "Ben-Ezra Construction"). The commission found that Karagula and Ezra were not licensed to build bridges, had never attempted to build a bridge, and used substandard materials in the bridge's construction. Photographs taken after the collapse showed that the bridge was constructed out of rusty metal pipes bound together with wire.

The commission concluded that the bridge's engineer, Micha Bar-Ilan, did not submit a blueprint for the bridge, designed a bridge that was inadequate for its intended use, and did not properly supervise or coordinate the bridge's construction. The commission faulted the Maccabiah Games' organizers for poor coordination and oversight over the bridge's assembly.

An investigation by Augustine Zycher for the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council reported that the Israeli army had employed Tamir Rowner, an experienced bridge construction engineer, to build previous bridges for the games. For the 1997 games, Maccabiah officials, apparently unwilling to pay the army's price of $111,000, accepted a bid from Irgunit to build the bridge for $34,750.

According to Zycher, Mishori kept $7,700 of the payment and gave the rest to Karagula and Ben-Ezra to erect the bridge. Karagula and Ben-Ezra hired Bar-Ilan to design and oversee the bridge's construction. Bar-Ilan claimed that his bridge as designed would support 250 kg per square metre, which did not meet Israeli government standards which required a pedestrian bridge to support 500 kg per square metre. In any event, the Dotan investigation found that the bridge was far weaker than what Bar-Ilan claimed. Furthermore, a municipal permit was required to construct the bridge, which Karagula and Ben-Ezra did not obtain. The municipality in which the bridge was constructed was Ramat Gan. Zvi Bar, Ramat Gan's mayor and head of the city planning division which issued construction permits, was a member of the Maccabiah committee which helped select Irgunit. Bar apparently did not ensure that Irgunit, Karagula, or Ben-Ezra obtained the necessary permit and made no effort to ensure that the bridge as constructed was safe.