The Oil Prospectors' Camp at Mount Avnon

The story

At the foot of Mount Avnon, on the northern rim of the Great Makhtesh, the Iraq Petroleum Company set up in 1941 a residential camp for its workers. In 1938 the Mandate authority published the "Mining of Oil Ordinance", and in 1939 it distributed thirty-one licenses for the extraction of oil: eleven to the Iraq Petroleum Company, eighteen to the Company for the Development of Oil in the Land of Israel and two to the Jordan Corporation. The geological surveys estimated that there is a chance of oil trapped above the groundwater in the Hatira ridge, and it was decided to drill at the bottom of the makhtesh — which is itself a kind of giant natural borehole. In order to reach the drilling site the company paved the Petroleum Road, as a soling road that crossed the makhtesh. About two kilometers south of the road the engineers poured a concrete slab on which the drilling rig was supposed to stand. The camp itself was divided in two: the northern camp, with about six buildings of various sizes, and the southern camp, near the cliff, with two large buildings. The drilling plans were halted with the deterioration of the security situation and the outbreak of the War of Independence, and the site was abandoned. The buildings of the camp were destroyed and a few standing walls remain of them; the concrete slab of the drilling rig still exists at the bottom of the makhtesh. Ten years later, in 1951, the town of Yeruham arose a few kilometers to the west.

• British Mandate
• Industry
• Yeruham