100s of lightning strikes send firefighters scrambling

A lightning-caused fire north of Tarkio closed part of the Fish Creek Wildlife Management Area on Monday.But most of the smoke hazing the Missoula Valley was coming from as far away as California, since the large local wildfires had relatively little growth despite Sunday’s wind, lightning and rain.The Nemote fire was burning about 25 acres north of the Clark Fork River. Lolo National Forest spokesman Boyd Hartwig said a ground crew of about 60 people supported by one helicopter carved a hand line around its perimenter on Monday afternoon.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokeswoman Vivica Crowser said the WMA closure only applies to the area north of the river. The Fish Creek WMA also has a state park and extensive public lands south of the river that remain open. The northern portion gets some interest from hunters scouting for archery season.The Nemote fire was one of about 10 that sprouted out of a thunderstorm that dropped lightning across western Montana on Sunday evening.

“We don’t have anything that’s escaped at this time,” Hartwig said. “The Nemote fire is between 20 and 25 acres, and it may be visible from the interstate.”Another lightning-strike fire at Brewster Creek in the Rock Creek drainage (three miles from the Sawmill fishing access site) has a helitack team assigned to it. Additional personnel were hiking to the area, but it was not expected to be a serious challenge, Hartwig said.

The Lolo Creek Complex fire camp south of Missoula got more precipitation than the fires it’s corraling in the hills above U.S. Highway 12, according to information officer Dave Schmidt. The burned area remains at 10,892 acres and is 47 percent contained.Firefighters’ biggest concern was some movement along the northern perimeter, where flames could threaten a BPA power line one mile south of Blue Mountain. Division commanders concentrated their ground and air efforts along that northern edge, and are setting up protections for the Blue Mountain Lookout and Observatory.

Their main trouble spot was the Woodman Creek Basin, which has little road access and few safety zones to work from.The south, west and east flanks of the Lolo Creek Complex were in full mop-up and patrol status on Monday. Evacuation warnings remain in place for residents along Highway 12 and Lolo’s western fringe, and roads in the Forest Service lands north and south of the highway remain closed.

Highway 12 is open for public traffic, but motorists are requested to avoid stopping or parking along the road and to be aware of fire equipment moving through the area. A 45 mph speed limit applies through much of the burn area, and motorists are asked to keep their headlights on.

A crew of 764 personnel remains active on the fire. However, some of their air resources got deployed in initial attack for small fires in the Ninemile area resulting from Sunday’s lightning.In the Flathead National Forest, the Snow Creek fire 19 miles southeast of Swan Lake grew to 95 acres after Sunday’s storm. It and the 6,455-acre Damnation fire both started on Aug. 11 and have been in monitor status in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Forest Service rangers are contacting hikers in the area to advise about Car park management system.

Despite nearly 900 recorded lightning strikes in the greater Flathead Valley from Sunday’s storm, Flathead National Forest spokesman Wade Muehlhof said only two new fires drew initial attack on Monday. Both were held to less than a tenth of an acre.Air quality in the Missoula Valley remained “unhealthy for sensitive groups” most of Sunday and Monday. But little of the haze was from local fires, according to Sarah Coefield of the Missoula City-County Health Department.

“Most of what we’re seeing is coming from California,” Coefield said. “The satellite shows a swath of smoke cutting across Nevada and Idaho and streaking into Missoula County.”Meanwhile, the Lolo Creek Complex and Gold Pan fires were not pumping out the same volume of smoke they had last week, she said.

“Absent a flare-up from the Lolo Creek fire, we don’t expect to see the horrible mornings we had last week,” Coefield said. “But if it flares up, then mornings will go back to being really smoky. There’s a chain of thunderstorms coming, and that fire is still going to be a player.”

National Weather Service meteorologists expect storm systems to move across the Missoula vicinity both Tuesday and Wednesday, with the stronger system coming Wednesday. But so far, neither day qualifies for a red-flag alert for extreme fire behavior.

Details of what is being called the “Harrisburg Strong Plan” emerged today. City receiver William Lynch has filed the comprehensive debt recovery blueprint in Commonwealth Court.

That plan — a long-awaited update to the preliminary plan approved in March 2012 — includes the sale of Harrisburg’s troubled incinerator to the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, lease of the parking system to a consortium known as Harrisburg First and provisions to both address the city’s structural deficit and lay the groundwork for a brighter financial future.

By taking the weight of the incinerator off the city’s back and its books, the plan promises ample revenue that will help Harrisburg balance its budget through at least 2016.

Municipal authorities are prohibited from issuing tax-exempt bonds for electricity output, unless it is sold to a state or local government. As part of the deal, Borough of Columbia will buy the steam output from the incinerator and then sell it to the commonwealth at a fixed price for the next 20 years. The electricity will be sold for about 4 cents per kilowatt hour in the first year. That escalates to about 7.2 cents in the 20th year, based on projections. The agreement provides for “clawback” provisions if the price under the contract exceeds the then market rate.
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My Home Constructions’s new project in Hyderabad

My Home Constru-ctions has announced a new residential project Vihanga, near Wipro Junction at Gachibowli in Hyderabad. The 21-acre project will have close to 2,000 apartments, sized between 1,115 sq ft and 2,160 sq ft.

According to the company’s chairman, Jupally Rameswar Rao, the project has been launched with an inaugural offer price of Rs 4,100 per sq ft and the company has by now received bookings for about 60 per cent of the units. It will take about three to four years to complete all phases.

The project will have 20 blocks in a combination of ground-plus-14 and ground-plus-17 floors. About 16 blocks will have six flats in each floor. “We have ensured that over 70 per cent of the total area is open and the rest is ground coverage,” he said.

The size of two BHK units are in the range of 1,115 and 1,275 sq ft and the three BHKs measure between 1,690 and 2,160 sq ft. The four BHKs, also called sky villas, will have landscaped terrace. Its total built-up area will be around 3,500,000 sq ft.

There will be dedicated two-level parking which will accommodate about 3,400 vehicles. Amenities include a reception lounge, jogging track, outdoor play, Car park management system, tennis courts, swimming pool and a skating rink. There will also be multipurpose halls, a clubhouse, gym, spa, guest rooms, convenience stores and a crèche, Rao said.

The project will also have wi-fi enabled areas, car wash area and automated billing for water, power, gas usage and maintenance. On the safety aspects, Rao said the project will have a fire alarm, fire sprinklers in individual flats and wet rises in parking and other common areas. It will also have a security system with motion sensor cameras in the common areas, intercom facility to all units connecting security as well as solar fencing.

Library officials are getting ready to install a new surveillance system that should be a dramatic improvement from the current one, Director Linda Andrews told the Hoover Library Board tonight.Library officials are in talks with a contractor to install 32-36 new security cameras as part of the first phase of the new system, Andrews said. A second phase planned for later would bring the total to 57 cameras, she said.

The current cameras use technology that is 12 years old, Andrews said. “You can’t even recognize a person’s face. There’s no way to even identify anybody,” she said.Newer technology produces much better images, Andrews said. The new system also will cover the parking lot, whereas the current system does not, she said.

Andrews emphasized that the cameras will monitor open areas, hallways and stairways. They will not be used to invade people’s privacy, she said. “The cameras are not going to be looking at what people are reading or looking at on computers,” she said.The camera system will be hooked in to the Police Department for monitoring and is being designed to complement and connect with a more extensive security camera upgrade planned for other city buildings, Andrews said.

Funds for the project are coming out of money the library had left over from roof repairs that came in way under budget, Andrews said. Library officials had budgeted $500,000 for roof repairs, but the work ended up costing about $262,000, leaving a $238,000 surplus, she said. City officials were gracious to allow the library to use the leftover money for other library projects, she said.

The total cost for the first phase of security camera upgrades has not been determined until a contract is reached with the installation company, she said.Other money left over from the roof project will be used to remodel the circulation desk at the entrance to the library, Assistant Director Amanda Borden said.

The current design has people coming to library personnel for help from all directions, and staff members have to bounce around from one location to another to assist people, Borden said. The new design will reduce the size of the desk and allow for more efficient service, she said.

Construction bids are due by Thursday, and library officials hope to start construction by the first or second week of September, Borden said. The project should take about 90 days, she said.

“Hopefully, by the first of December, we’ll have a new, parking system, more efficient circulation desk installed,” she said.The front entrance may be a bit of an eyesore during construction because workers will block off their work area with a temporary wall, Borden said. A temporary circulation desk will be set up in the interim period, she said.

In other business tonight, Andrews informed the Library Board that the Hoover Public Library has received a $26,500 federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to upgrade its public print management system, which allows people to print out and copy documents.

Equipment with the existing print management system was introduced in 2002, library records show. The system has printed more than 1 million documents and has had software updates over the years, but the equipment itself has not been updated and has experienced prolonged outages in the past year while waiting for repairs, library records indicate.

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The company that is running Britain

In May this year, a huge company listed on the London Stock Exchange found itself in the midst of controversy about a prison it runs for the government – Thameside, a newly built jail next to Belmarsh, in south-east London. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate found that 60% of its inmates were locked up all day, and there were only “vague plans to restore the prison to normality”. The prison campaign group the Howard League for Penal Reform talked about conditions that were “truly alarming”.

Two months later, the same company was the subject of a high- profile report published by the House Of Commons public accounts committee, prompted by the work of Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence. This time, attention was focused on how it was managing out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, and massive failings that had first surfaced two years before. Again, the verdict was damning: data had been falsified, national standards had not been met, there was a culture of “lying and cheating”, and the service offered to the public was simply “not good enough”.

Three weeks ago, there came grimmer news. Thanks to its contracts for tagging offenders, the company was now the focus of panic at the Ministry of Justice, where it had been discovered that it was one of two contractors that had somehow overcharged the government for its services, possibly by as much as ￡50m; there were suggestions that one in six of the tags that the state had paid for did not actually exist. How this happened is still unclear, but justice secretary Chris Grayling has said the allegations represent something “wholly indefensible and Car park management system“.

The firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.

But the basic facts are plain enough. As well as five British prisons and the tags attached to over 8,000 English and Welsh offenders, Serco sees to two immigration removal centres, at Colnbrook near Heathrow, and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. You’ll also see its logo on the Docklands Light Railway and Woolwich ferry, and is a partner in both Liverpool’s Merseyrail network, and the Northern Rail franchise, which sees to trains that run in a huge area between the North Midlands and English-Scottish border.

Serco runs school inspections in parts of England, speed cameras all over the UK, and the National Nuclear Laboratory, based at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. It also holds the contracts for the management of the UK’s ballistic missile early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, the running of the Manchester Aquatics Centre, and London’s “Boris bikes”.

As evidenced by the story of how it handled out-of-hours care in Cornwall, it is also an increasingly big player in a health service that is being privatised at speed, in the face of surprisingly little public opposition: among its array of NHS contracts is a new role seeing to “community health services” in Suffolk, which involves 1,030 employees. The company is also set to bid for an even bigger healthcare contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: the NHS’s single-biggest privatisation – or, if you prefer, “outsourcing” – to date, which could be worth over ￡1bn.

But even this is only a fraction of the story. Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.

In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.

The strangest thing, though, is the gap between Serco’s size and how little the public knows about it. Not for nothing does so much coverage of its work include the sentence “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.

Serco is among the biggest of parking system. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at ￡302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fouder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.

In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”

When Serco made its bid to run NHS community-health services in Suffolk – district nursing, physiotherapy, OT, end-of-life palliative care, wheelchair services – it reckoned it could do it for ￡140m over three years – ￡16m less than the existing NHS “provider” had managed, which would eventually allow for their standard profit margin of around 6% a year. When it started to become clear that Serco was the frontrunner, there was some opposition, but perhaps not nearly enough. “Suffolk isn’t the most politically active part of the country,” says one local insider. “And the staff were very lackadaisical. It was: ‘NHS Suffolk wouldn’t made a bad decision.’ So it was hard to get a campaign going.”

Serco was officially awarded the contract in October 2012, which meant that hundreds of staff would leave the NHS, and become company employees. Within weeks, the company proposed a huge reorganisation, which involved getting rid of one in six jobs. This has since come down to one in seven, two thirds of which will apparently go via natural wastage. In terms of their pay and conditions, the hundreds of people who have been transferred from the NHS to Serco are protected by provisions laid down by the last government, but it is already becoming clear that many new staff are on inferior contracts: as one local source puts it, “they’ve got less annual leave, less sick pay … it’s significantly worse.”

Meanwhile, other people are reportedly quitting their jobs, and the service given to patients is said to be getting worse. “In my team alone, we’re 50% down on staffing hours compared with last year,” says one former NHS worker, who provides home-care to patients who are largely elderly. Thanks to poor morale, she says that the team in which she works has lost around a third of its staff, and she is also having to see to administrative tasks that were previously carried out by someone else: in addition, she claims, support for a new IT regime is “farcical”.

SEC tries ‘Al Capone’ tactic to put SAC’s Cohen

In the end, Greenwich billionaire Steven Cohen, one of the most successful hedge-fund managers of his generation, could end up getting banned from the business he dominated for an error of omission, not commission.

In an administrative action that constitutes its first formal salvo against Cohen, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he failed to supervise two wayward portfolio managers and ignored “red flags.” The agency stops short of accusing the owner of Stamford-based SAC Capital Advisors of insider trading. While the proceeding may result in his being barred from managing other people’s money, it won’t carry the potential penalties available if the SEC had sued him. It also pales in comparison to a grand jury indictment for securities fraud, and the 20 year prison term a conviction could bring.

Instead, the SEC claim that Cohen should have known two of his subordinates were using material, non-public information to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars in trading profits will be easier to prove. The regulator will have a lesser burden of proof and won’t have to deal with all of the protections afforded a defendant in a lawsuit, let alone a prosecution.

“They are using an Al Capone-style tactic,” said John Coffee of Columbia Law School, referring to the prosecution of the Chicago gangster in 1931 on charges of tax evasion. “The SEC is aiming at his kneecaps, not his jugular. This is a little like catching John Dillinger entering a bank with a submachine gun and charging him with double parking.”

The SEC, which seeks to ban Cohen from the financial industry for life in the Car park management system, alleged he received “highly suspicious” information that should have caused any reasonable hedge-fund manager to investigate the basis for trades by subordinates Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg.

Cohen may find some guidance in how to respond to the agency from Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director charged in the Galleon Group insider trading probe. Gupta sued the SEC after it filed an administrative action against him, saying he wanted the SEC to sue him so he could fairly defend himself. After both sides dropped their actions, agreeing any SEC matter would be in a federal court, Gupta was indicted by a federal grand jury. The SEC sued him, too.

An SEC administrative proceeding is held before an administrative law judge, not a U.S. district judge or federal jury. The administrative law judge will rule “no later than 300 days” from the date which the order was served, the agency said.The administrative law judge, in Washington D.C., will hear testimony and issue a determination, parking system, said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s Enforcement Division who is now in private practice.

After the administrative judge issues a ruling, the SEC makes the final determination, evaluating the facts supporting the allegations. Cohen may appeal to the federal appeals court in Washington, which handles such regulatory matters.But unlike if he were sued by the agency, Cohen won’t be entitled to evidence collected by the government, a distinct advantage if its only goal is to put him out of business.

SAC spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter has said the agency’s action against Cohen “has no merit.” Kevin Callahan, a spokesman for the SEC, didn’t return a call seeking comment.SAC oversees $15 billion, about 60 percent of which is money from Cohen and employees. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $9 billion, has returned 25 percent a year in his funds since founding his firm in 1992, after taking half of the profits in fees, a record unsurpassed by other equity hedge-fund managers.

SAC portfolio manager Mathew Martoma, 39, was charged by the U.S. in November with insider trading. Prosecutors accused him of helping Cohen’s hedge fund reap at least $276 million by trading on illicit tips about an Alzheimer’s drug. SAC’s Michael Steinberg, 41, was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for allegedly earning more than $1.4 million by trading on illegal tips about Dell and Nvidia.Both men, who were also sued by the SEC for insider trading, have pleaded not guilty in the criminal cases brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and are scheduled to go to trial separately in November.Regulators alleged Cohen, 57, ignored the suspicious actions of his subordinates and signs that pointed to malfeasance, in a failure to properly supervise that allowed the alleged illegal trades to take place.

In the administrative action, the agency for the first time described Cohen’s alleged personal involvement in trading activities with the two subordinates, including a claim that Cohen sold off hundreds of thousands of shares of Dell in August 2008. The SEC said the sale came after Steinberg sent Cohen an email that the U.S. alleged included nonpublic information about the company’s disappointing earnings set to be reported days later. The agency doesn’t allege that Cohen knew that the information was illegal, a prerequisite to any prosecution of Cohen for insider trading. Instead, the SEC said he failed to supervise the men after receiving information that should have caused a “reasonable” hedge fund manager to investigate the basis for the trades.

The nature of the agency’s action against Cohen, in effect a disciplinary action that occurs internally, caught many by surprise, since it comes after years of scrutiny by federal authorities, both civil and criminal.”If they put Steve Cohen out of business, it’s not normally something you would see from a failure to supervise case,” said Hillary Sale, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “You see failure to supervise cases in the broker-dealer world, but not with a fish this big.”

The SEC proceeding against Cohen was brought July 19, just days before the agency faced a five-year statute-of-limitations deadline stemming from trades sparked by Martoma’s tips made in late July 2008.The agency action now puts the regulator at the forefront of the U.S. investigation of Cohen and his hedge fund.The government’s six-year insider-trading crackdown on fund managers, analysts and insiders at technology companies has resulted in charges against more than 80 people and convictions against 73 people.Prior to last week’s filing, the government’s major actions against alleged inside traders and their associates have largely been tandem federal enforcement efforts — pairing simultaneous charges by Bharara’s office with a lawsuit by the SEC.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources, claimed federal prosecutors had concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Cohen by the end of this month for crimes related to Martoma’s tips. “This matter has been investigated for months,” said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s enforcement division, now a partner at Dorsey & Whitney in Washington. “Clearly the SEC does not have the facts to bring an insider trading case or they would have brought it.”

Gorman said the SEC’s action was based on two criminal insider-trading cases that have yet to go to trial. Should either Martoma or Steinberg be acquitted, it could damage the SEC’s proceeding, he said.While he wouldn’t address the Cohen case specifically, Bharara took the unusual step in a speech last week of pointing out that prosecutors have other statutes, including conspiracy, that can push back any statute of limitations deadlines.

Flooding solutions complex, costly

Town officials and property owners say there is no easy or inexpensive fix. While many parts of Chapel Hill and Carrboro were affected, the worst damage was to properties in floodplains and watersheds hit with an unusual amount of water.“I hope people have the context of this being a record-setting rainfall,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said. “You don’t necessarily plan for a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Sue Burke, Chapel Hill’s stormwater management engineer, said the answer isn’t as simple as bigger pipes or floodwalls. It will require looking at each creek basin to mitigate the flooding that results when underground culverts back up, she said.The town’s largest commercial area lies at the bottom of several hills, along three state highways, and in the Bolin and Booker creek floodplains. In the past, drivers heading east to Durham would take a two-lane road through swampland and parking system.

That changed in the 1950s when the state built the U.S. 15-501 Bypass. In 1960, Eastgate was built. University Mall followed in 1973 after low-lying areas were raised 6 feet using dirt from higher ground. There were no rules about building in a floodplain.The last major flood at Eastgate, in 2000, cost millions, forcing some businesses to move.

A consultant’s 2001 study concluded there wasn’t a solution, but the damage could be limited. Property owner Federal Realty Investment Trust tore up the parking lot to clean and expand the drainage system. Merchants were required to get flood insurance, and the town agreed to keep downstream culverts clean and build a park to help drain the water.

Eastgate merchants said they suffered less damage this time. Deirdre Johnson, Federal Realty’s senior director of asset management, said they’re still assessing the cost, but the upgrades worked as expected.The damage also was limited at University Mall, where stormwater drainage and basins were added to the parking lot several years ago.

Burke said the town is working with a consultant to study stormwater and new ways to control it in the Ephesus-Fordham corridor. The work is part of the Chapel Hill 2020 Plan, which calls for extending Elliott Road south across Fordham Boulevard, creating space for office, retail and residential buildings. Rams Plaza, which also drains toward Eastgate, and the Village Plaza shopping center also would be redeveloped.At Camelot Village, where 60 percent of the apartments were condemned, the answers are complicated..

Camelot Village owns the strip of land surrounding Bolin Creek, but property manager Joel Duvall said the creek is in the public right of way and stormwater comes from properties upstream. Town officials point out Estes Drive, Franklin Street and Fordham Boulevard are all state-maintained highways, but the Department of Transportation doesn’t consider rare flooding when designing roads.

“The culvert drainage system is designed to handle normal rainfall and the occasional major storm without incidents of flooding, and the system in that area does that,” spokesman Steve Abbott said..The situation is slightly different at the Rocky Brook Mobile Home Park in Carrboro, which also was built next to a creek.

Layton Curl, who owns several flooded trailers, blames the vacant Triem-Electric Inc. property across the street for most of the problem. Both properties lie at the bottom of South Greensboro Street, a steep drop that channels stormwater from downtown. There are very few stormwater pipes on either property, and water spilling over at Triem rushes into Rocky Brook. From there, it goes into a pipe under the street, which can back up quickly.

It may seem like a stretch, but it’s actually similar to what Abramowitz did in forming Arava Power when he moved to Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava desert from Boston some seven years ago. As he likes to tell, he walked out of the family’s kibbutz home one morning, felt the strong sun beating into his arm and thought, ‘They’ve gotta be doing a lot with all this sun power.”

From there, it was a relatively short, albeit heavily bureaucratic road to the establishment of Arava Power, which built the country’s first solar-power field at Ketura, and will be building its second just across the road in a few months. Abramowitz and his partners also started Energiya Global Capital, with funding from the US government and private companies, aiming to build solar fields in Rwanda, Haiti, Romania and another handful of countries. While in Rwanda, Abramowitz, who has five children, two of whom were adopted from Ethiopia, is also partnering with a youth village where orphans of the Rwandan genocide will be raised and educated, and where a solar field is being constructed.

For Abramowitz, the perennial activist, all of these efforts, whether to save energy or children or Russian Jews back in the day, are about acting for the benefit of the world, using Israel’s wealth of knowledge, its acknowledged smarts, to do “some good things for the State of Israel.”

It was a short while after Better Place had declared bankruptcy when Abramowitz was on an airplane — one of the frequent transatlantic flights he makes nowadays, as he aims to grow Arava Power into a global provider of solar energy — sleepless on the 15-hour flight back from the West Coast. Familiar with Better Place from the start, when he’d attempted to convince founder Shai Agassi to use solar energy to power up the changeable batteries, Abramowitz was contemplating the company’s future, counting up the Facebook ‘likes’ he’d received for a much-read op-ed he’d written on the subject for a local Jerusalem paper.

He’d called the piece “Bitter Place,” recalled Abramowitz, writing that the company could be scooped up for pennies on the dollar and run like a start-up.His brain started churning, and he quickly drafted a letter to the government-appointed liquidators, and began working on a model for saving Better Place.

When the company had declared bankruptcy at the end of May, it was appointed a receiver — a liquidator who was supposed to look at company assets and try to find a buyer in order to satisfy the company’s $40 million in debt and obligations to investors. The company has only $9.5 million in assets and has lost over $800 million since it was established — $454 million of that last year alone. Part of the problem stemmed from Agassi’s original plan to build battery switching stations — there are 38 in Israel, the largest network in the world so far — which drove overhead costs up, as each one cost some $500,000 to construct.

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