Tuesday, June 26, 2007

How one's life can change in a minute

I went home from work yesterday at 17:20, which is about normal (we start at 7am, by the way). At about 17:45 my factory went up in flames.

From what I could see, most of the production facilities were completely destroyed, although the office block (which is where I work and so is important to me) seemed to be untouched. The police wouldn't let people get close enough to see what was going on - for obvious reasons - so it was difficult to judge last night how much damage was done. The huge plume of black smoke was a clue to the amount of damage.

The story began to be broadcast from the 7pm radio news, and from that moment on there was about an hour in which my phone was in constant use, mainly from people calling me to find out what was happening. We didn't "make" the television news as we had to compete with several, slightly more important stories.

I couldn't write about this last night as at the moment I don't have an internet connection at home, and of course I couldn't post from my office. I'm writing this on a computer in the kibbutz accounts office.

Shortly I'm going to down to investigate the ruins, and apparently we're going to have an emergency meeting to decide what can be done in the coming month. What about all our customers and the chairs which we have produced for them?

This story is somewhat dwarfed by other natural disasters, such as floods in Britain or a huge fire in California, not to mention human stories, such as a cassette from hostage Gil'ad Shalit or the summit meeting at Sharm El Sheik.

More later when I know more.

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