Update of the Fire Consuming Israels' North

Evergreen Supertanker, which has capacity of 80,000 liters of water to join efforts to put out wildfire in northern Israel on Sunday morning.

The inferno that has been raging in northern Israel since Thursday, the worst in the country’s history, will hopefully be brought under control if not completely doused by the end of Sunday, the Israel Police and IDF predicted on Saturday night.

The expectation is that the blaze, which has ravaged 50,000 dunams (12,500 acres) in and around the Carmel Mountain Range and killed 41 Israelis, and which was still erupting in new flash-points throughout Saturday and into Saturday night, will be largely defeated with the arrival of the last of 33 aircraft dispatched to the emergency effort by countries from around the world.
Crucially, on Sunday morning, a privately owned US Boeing 747 – the Evergreen Supertanker, the largest fire-fighting aircraft in the world – will land in Ben-Gurion International Airport and make its first flight over the fire at around 6 a.m., a senior IAF officer said. The plane can carry 80 tons of water and fire retardant.

“Our assessment is that we will be able to put out the worst of the fire by Sunday afternoon with 33 planes that will be here from around the world,” the officer said, although emergency personnel have cautioned that new fires may continue to emerge over the coming few days.

By Saturday night, more than 17,000 people had been evacuated from 15 communities, and five million trees had been destroyed, police said.

A fleet of international assistance aircraft from Russia, Greece, France, Bulgaria, Britain, Italy and Turkey flew sortie after sortie over the flames, dropping large quantities of water and fire retardants, before returning for more runs. On the ground, besieged firefighters managed to beat the fires back from Nir Etzion, Ein Hod, Haifa’s Denya neighborhood, and the Tirat Hacarmel-Atlit area.