About Caroline McDonald

Caroline McDonald is a writer and former senior editor of the Risk Management Monitor and Risk Management magazine.
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Most Organizations Deny Prevalence of Fraud

At a loss of more than $6 billion annually, experts have found fraud occurs in most organizations, but 80% of respondents to a recent survey by ACL believe their organization has “medium to no” exposure.

The 2017 Fraud Survey of more than 500 professionals in the United States and Canada found that “alternative facts” extend to the mentality among many businesses.

“As the phenomena of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ permeate the U.

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S. landscape, it is interesting to see how disconnected many executives are from the true prevalence of fraud and corruption in their organizations,” said Dan Zitting, chief product officer at ACL, a risk management software provider. He added that companies increasingly discover they have had “numerous instances of potential fraud” that need to be investigated.

Almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) also said that most instances of fraud committed in their organizations are not detected, and more than 75% said that at least some of the fraud that is detected goes unreported.

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Respondents noted that a company’s fraud experts can feel pressure from senior leaders, direct managers and even peers to suppress or alter their fraud findings. While the existence of internal pressure is no surprise to most, the survey confirmed that pressure from all sides makes fraud harder to overcome.

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“As long as companies refuse to admit that fraud exists, the fraud will continue,” Zitting said. “As unscrupulous employees and vendors realize the company’s ignorance, the problem has great potential to grow.”

According to ACL:
2017 Fraud Survey Results

Falling Trees Can Cause Property Damage, Injury or Death

During and after large storms, especially those with high winds, there are always reports of fallen trees and tree limbs, which can cause injury or death to those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the past few months in California alone, a woman was killed by a falling tree in the San Francisco Bay area on Jan. 9; another woman was struck and killed by a falling tree while walking on a golf course in the Bay area on Jan. 8; and the mother of a bride was killed when a tree fell on a wedding party in Southern California on Dec. 19. In New York City’s Bryant Park, a woman was killed and five people were injured when a massive tree snapped in half on Sept. 4, 2015.

Falling trees are also a major cause of property damage. If winds are strong enough, even healthy trees can be uprooted or broken, according to the Tree Care Industry Association (TCIA).

It might not take a storm or high winds to cause a cracked or rotted tree to fail under its own weight, however.

Cracks are hazardous because they compromise the structure of the tree and can eventually split the stem in two.

Cracks are particularly dangerous when combined with internal decay, according to the TCIA, thus the presence of multiple cracks and decay indicates a potentially hazardous tree.

Property owners should be concerned about trees falling, especially if cracks are evident. “While trees are genetically designed to withstand storms, all trees can fail – and defective trees fail sooner than healthy trees,” Tchukki Andersen, staff arborist at TCIA, said in a statement. “To a professional arborist, certain defects are indicators that a tree has an increased potential to fail.”

Cracks in tree trunks can be one of the major indicators of an unstable tree. Most cracks are caused by improper closure of wounds or by the splitting of weak branch unions. Cracks can be found in branches, stems or roots, and vary in type and severity:

  • Horizontal and vertical cracks run across the grain of the wood and develop just before the tree fails, making them very difficult to detect. Vertical cracks run with the wood grain along the length of the tree and may appear as shear or ribbed cracks.
  • Shear cracks can run completely through the stem and separate it into two halves. As the tree bends and sways in the wind, one half of the stem slides over the other, elongating the crack. Eventually the enlarging crack causes the two halves of the stem to shear apart.
  • Ribbed cracks are created as the tree attempts to seal over a wound. Margins of the crack meet and mesh but are reopened due to tree movement or extremely cold temperatures.
  • Thicker annual rings are created in order to stabilize the developing crack at the location of the wound. This forms the ribbed appearance over a period of many years.

To prevent damage, TCIA recommends having trees examined by a qualified arborist to determine the potential for failure. An expert will measure the shell thickness in a few locations around a tree’s circumference, determine the width of the crack opening and check for any other defects.

Weather Threatens Oroville Dam Emergency Efforts

As measures are taken to repair a damaged spillway at the Oroville Dam in Northern California, weather forecasters are calling for rain later this week. Almost 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes below the dam, the largest in the country, on Feb. 12 as erosion of the dam’s emergency spillway threatened to flood the towns below.

While the situation was said to have stabilized on Sunday morning, conditions worsened and evacuation orders were issued. Roads in the area quickly backed up as a result, according to reports.

The dam’s main spillway was damaged after a winter season of record rains and snows following years of drought in the state.

Photo: California Department of Water Resources

California Representative John Garamendi told MSNBC that the evacuation was essential. “Fortunately when they were able to open the main spillway gates. That began to lower the reservoir level, because the water coming into the reservoir was about half of what they were able to expel down the main spillway, so it’s stabilized.”

The next issue, he said, is whether the spillway can be patched up “sufficiently to weather the storms that are clearly ahead of us.” Garamendi added that the months of March and April are the heavy storm season in the state.

Sheriff Kory Honea of Butte County said at a press conference that the Department of Water Resources (DWR) reported that the dam’s erosion is not advancing as rapidly as they thought. He said a plan is in place to plug the hole in the spillway by dropping large bags of rocks by helicopter. The DWR said that another measure being taken to relieve pressure on the spillway has been to raise the rate of discharge water from 55,000 cubic feet per second to 100,000 cfs, which it said has been working.

Helicopters transport large bags of rocks from the Oroville Dam parking lot, to the erosion site at the Oroville Dam auxiliary spillway in California, to help fight further erosion, February 13, 2017. Oroville is in Butte County. Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources

The New York Times reported that Northern California is close to 225% above normal rainfall levels since Oct. 1. According to the Times:

Repeated rounds of rain have pounded the area in recent weeks, rapidly raising the water level at Lake Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in California and a linchpin of the state’s water system. On Tuesday, a gaping hole opened in the main spillway that is used to release extra water. Early Saturday, an adjacent emergency spillway was also put into use, the first time water flowed over it since the dam was finished in 1968, department officials said.

State officials have said the 770-foot Oroville Dam itself, the nation’s tallest, is sound.

The problems with Oroville Dam are not a surprise to some. In 2005, during a relicensing process for the dam, three environmental groups warned the DWR of potential dangers with the emergency spillway, which is not a concrete spillway, but a concrete lip with a dirt hillside below. The concern was that the hillside could be easily eroded in the case of an emergency.

The Washington Post reported:

The upgrade would have cost millions of dollars and no one wanted to foot the bill, said Ronald Stork, senior policy advocate for Friends of the River, one of the groups that filed the motion.

“When the dam is overfull, water goes over that weir and down the hillside, taking much of the hillside with it,” Stork told The Washington Post. “That causes huge amounts of havoc. There’s roads, there’s transmission lines, power lines that are potentially in the way of that water going down that auxiliary spillway.”

Federal officials, however, determined that nothing was wrong and the emergency spillway, which can handle 350,000 cubic feet of water per second, “would perform as designed” and sediment resulting from erosion would be insignificant, according to a July 2006 memo from John Onderdonk, then a senior civil engineer for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Garamendi said that “What happened with the widening of the sinkhole was the result of someone overlooking the problems, including the fact that there was no concrete apron on the spillway.”

He also noted that while there will most likely be federal dollars to help rebuild the dam, “This is just one really startling, quite tragic and potentially catastrophic example of what’s happened to the infrastructure across America. We’ve seen bridges collapse in Minnesota, we’ve seen them on I-5 in Washington State and now this reservoir, which is the linchpin of California’s water system.”

Delta Outage Spotlights Technology Risks


Delta’s computer outage on Jan. 29 was over by midnight, but its effects have extended into the week, not only resulting in 170 cancelations on Sunday, but grounding more than 100 flights on Monday and causing many delays. Adding to the frustration was the fact that the company’s mobile apps were also not working.

This latest incident follows another computer outage for Delta in mid-August, when flights were canceled for two days, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

Such outages can be costly. A Southwest Airlines outage in July caused more than 2,000 flights to be canceled and cost about $54 million. The August Delta outage, which involved a fire, resulted in cancellation of 2,300 flights over three days and cost the airline $150 million in lost revenue, according to USA Today.

Jim Corridore, an analyst at CFRA Research, told USA Today on Monday that Delta’s computer outage puts a “spotlight on risks of airline technology infrastructure, much of which is old and patched with differing systems.” He said that airlines build new programming over old software, especially after a merger, when computer languages may differ. Programmers’ assumptions about how software will work are sometimes wrong.

While large companies such as Delta would have fewer outages with more testing of their systems, this is an expensive proposition.

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According to USA Today:

Gil Hecht, CEO of Continuity Software, which tests computer systems for large banks and insurers, compared the construction of complex computer systems to a layer cake, with web servers, database software, storage and possibly interaction with other systems such as government computers that check whether passengers are allowed to fly.

“Testing should be done by every single layer and every single business service that participates in the critical infrastructure, and some of them are simply not under the airline’s control,” Hecht said.
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He compared one way of testing to running a car into a tree to see whether the airbags work, which isn’t possible while keeping a computer system working. Instead, testing for a large financial institution or airline must confirm that each layer is configured to work well with all the others, he said.

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“In order to do that, critical infrastructure operators must do much more testing, whether it’s manual by humans or by technology or by any means possible,” Hecht said. “Yes, it costs money. Quite a lot. But if more money and more effort will be driven into testing, we will have far less down time and data-loss events.”