On the 24th of May, 2001, around 700 people gathered at the prestigious Versailles Wedding
Hall in Jerusalem to celebrate the marriage of Keren and Asaf Dror.
What should have been one of the happiest days of this couple’s life, however, turned
into one of the deadliest civil engineering disasters in Israeli history, and brought
to light a systemic problem within the country’s construction industry.
Ever since the state of Israel formed in 1948 there had been a serious need for more housing.
Construction could barely keep up with demand as more and more immigrants poured into the
country.
The rush to build high-capacity functional housing goes some way to explaining the brutalist
look of a lot of early Israeli architecture.
Indeed, the emphasis was often on quantity over quality.
Engineers throughout the country were always under pressure to find ways to build more
buildings more quickly, and at a lower cost.
In the late 1970s, one engineer, Eli Ron, invented the Pal-Kal system.
Using this method, floors and ceilings were created by combining layers of thin cement
with metal plates.
This did away with the need for heavy steel reinforcements, which had previously slowed
down construction and made everything more expensive.
Eli Ron was the main engineer behind the construction of the Versailles Wedding Hall, which was
completed in 1986.
He employed his Pal-Kal method to construct this three-storey building… which significantly
sped up the process.
The project, however, was not entirely straightforward.
The original plans for the building determined that it would have two distinct sides - one
which would have three storeys and one which would have two storeys.
However, late in the construction process, after the two-storey part of the building
had been completed, the owners requested that both sides of the building should be made
up to three storeys.
The Pal-Kal system meant that an extra floor could be added quickly and cheaply, but in
this case the calculations that should have been done before making this change were rushed.
They failed to take account of one important aspect: the dead load versus the live load
that the building would have to bear.
The dead load of a building is the weight of the building itself: the walls, ceiling
and floor.
In order to stand, a building has to be capable of holding its dead load.
The live load is anything that can be added: furniture, decoration and, crucially, people.
The live load of a building can vary considerably depending on the occupancy and it is critical
that a building can cope with any potential live load on top of its dead load.
The side of the building that had the extra floor had originally been designed under the
impression that it only needed to support the dead load of the roof.
Large amounts of furniture and people were unlikely to be placed on the roof, and so
very little live load was included in calculations.
Another late change to the design did help to mitigate this issue, though – extra rooms
were created using wall partitions on the floor below, which provided extra support
to the additional floor.
These wall partitions were kept in place for 15 years, until a few weeks before the day
of the disaster.
They were removed in order to create a more open-plan space, with the owners of the hall
completely unaware that these dividing walls had actually been helping to hold up the floor
above all this time.
On the 24th of May, 2001, 700 guests poured into the Versailles Wedding Hall to enjoy
an evening of celebration.
The wedding reception was to be held on the third floor, in the Versailles Banquet Hall,
where food was served.
The dinner tables were set up along the walls, to leave plenty of space in the middle of
the hall for people to dance.
As the evening went on, more and more guests congregated on the dancefloor.
At 10:30pm all was well – meals had been served, guests were dancing, the bride and
groom were happy and surrounded by their friends and family.
At 10:40pm, a shudder went through the dancefloor.
Seconds later it collapsed straight down, taking around 400 guests with it.
Remaining almost in a single piece, the floor pancaked down onto the floor below, causing
that to collapse in turn.
The combined weight of the second and third floor crashed easily through the first floor,
before coming to rest at ground level.
Back up in the Banquet Hall, shocked wedding guests were left looking at a gaping hole
and a cloud of dust where, seconds before, hundreds of people had been dancing.
The whole thing had been almost instant – too quick for anyone to react.
Some guests were left stranded on isolated pieces of flooring, while others were able
to grab children and relatives and evacuate the building.
A call was placed to emergency services at 10:42pm, and the first ambulance was on site
two minutes later.
The scale of the destruction was immediately evident, and over the next few hours this
first ambulance would be joined by at least 80 more from the surrounding area.
In the first two hours after the floor collapsed, around 300 people were taken to four different
hospitals around Jerusalem, but many guests could not be accounted for.
The Israeli military supplied vehicles and equipment to dig through the rubble… but
it was determined that the remains of the building were too unstable for some of these
to be used.
Instead, the majority of the work had to be done by hand.
The rescue effort went on for nearly two days until the afternoon of the 26th of May, by
which time three people had been pulled out of the rubble alive.
No further survivors were found after this point.
In total, 23 people died, and over 380 were injured.
The bride, Keren Dror, suffered serious pelvic injuries, while the groom, Asaf Dror suffered
minor injuries.
They were given adjoining hospital beds while they recovered.
The dead were almost entirely their friends and family.
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, it was initially thought that the collapse
was the result of a terrorist attack.
This theory was quickly dismissed by investigators, who determined that the construction of the
building had been at fault.
Eleven people were detained by police for further questioning – including the owners
of the hall, the engineer Eli Ron, and several other engineers who had worked on the building.
Investigators determined that the use of the Pal-Kal method was one of the most significant
factors in the collapse… but that it alone was not to blame.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, following the removal of the load-bearing partition
walls, the floor had started to sag.
The owners of the building noticed, but considered it to be a purely cosmetic issue.
They attempted to level out the sag using filler, but rather than fixing the problem,
this only increased the dead load on an area that was already dangerously weak.
The Pal-Kal method of building was known to be dangerous – in fact, it had been banned
by the Israel Standards Institute in 1996, five years before the Wedding Hall disaster.
In 1998 an Interior Ministry directive had instructed all municipalities and local authorities
to inspect buildings that were constructed using Pal-Kal – but this directive had mostly
gone unheeded.
The investigation revealed a culture of lax enforcement of building regulations, as well
as allegations of corruption.
Another immediate safety check of buildings that had been built using the Pal-Kal method
was ordered, and though this time it was actually carried out, only one building was closed
down as a result.
In October 2004, Avraham Adi, Uri Nisim, and Efraim Adiv, the three owners of the Versailles
Wedding Hall, were convicted of causing death by negligence.
Nisim was sentenced to four months of community service, while Adiv and Adi were sentenced
to 30 months in prison.
In 2007, Eli Ron was also convicted of death by negligence and was sentenced to four years
in prison, while three other engineers that had worked on the construction were convicted
and sentenced to between six and 22 months in prison.
The Versailles Wedding Hall was subsequently demolished and a memorial for the victims
was erected across the street from where it had once stood.
While the memorial was undoubtedly appreciated, it would take 15 years for any of the victims
of the disaster to receive any compensation.
While stressing that it was not an admission of guilt, the state eventually paid the equivalent
of around $32 million to the families of the dead and injured guests.
A special committee set up in the wake of the disaster made several recommendations
as to how a repeat of the accident could be avoided.
However, these recommendations were not all implemented.
In 2011, State Comptroller's Office Director-General Shmuel Golan said, “Ten years after the
disaster and we're still in a situation where the quality of construction is left largely
unchecked."
To this day, many buildings that were built using the Pal-Kal method stand in Jerusalem.
The process of identifying buildings that are at risk, determining what repairs might
alleviate this risk, deciding who should pay for these repairs, and actually making them
is a slow and painstaking one.
Until it is complete, the conditions exist for another disaster similar to the Versailles
Wedding Hall collapse.