Category Archives: Safety

Dallas Alarms Hack a Warning of Infrastructure Vulnerability

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Dallas residents were wide awake and in a state of confusion late Friday night when the city’s outdoor emergency system was hacked, causing all of its 156 alarms to blast for an hour-and-a-half until almost 1:30 a.

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With some interpreting the warning as a bomb or missile, a number of residents dialed 9-1-1, but the number of calls—4,400 in all—overwhelmed the system, causing some callers to wait for up to six minutes for a response, the New York Times reported.

The alarms blasted for 90-second durations about 15 times, Rocky Vaz, the director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, told reporters at a news conference.

Mr. Vaz said emergency workers and technicians had to first figure out whether the sirens had been activated because of an actual emergency. And turning off the sirens also proved difficult, eventually prompting officials to shut down the entire system.

“Every time we thought we had turned it off, the sirens would sound again, because whoever was hacking us was continuously hacking us,” Sana Syed, a spokeswoman for the city told the Times.

Eventually the alarms were turned off, which had to be done manually, one alarm at a time.

On Saturday afternoon the system, used for hurricanes and other warnings, was still down, but officials said they hoped to have it functioning soon.

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 They also said they had pinpointed the origin of the security breach after ruling out that the alarms had come from their control system or from remote access.

Mr. Vaz said that Dallas had reached out to the Federal Communications Commission for help and was taking steps to prevent hackers from setting off the system again, but that city officials had not communicated with federal law enforcement authorities.

Security officials have warned about the risks that such hacking attacks pose to infrastructure, which is often aging and in disrepair. Federal data shows that the number of attacks on critical infrastructure appears to have risen: to nearly 300 in 2015 from just under 200 in 2012. Attacks include a 2008 oil pipeline explosion in Turkey; a 2015 hacking of Ukraine’s power grid, leaving 200,000 people in Western Ukraine without electricity for several hours; and in 2013, hackers tried to gain control of a small dam in upstate New York. Seven computer specialists, who worked for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

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, were indicted for trying to take over controls of the dam, according to the Times.

Food Defense Initiatives Can Safeguard Your Company

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When most people think of product contamination and recalls, the first thing that comes to mind is food poisoning cases from bacteria such as e-coli and listeria. Food and drug companies, however, are experiencing malicious and intentional product tampering that can be equally deadly and dangerous. Many of us can’t forget the 1982 cyanide Tylenol crisis, Johnson & Johnson’s worst nightmare as reported cases of death from their products came pouring in, causing recalls nationwide.

The Tylenol case was long ago, but unfortunately, decades later and despite modern day advancements in packaging and processes, there is still a steady flow of cases globally, where bad actors contaminate products. This can lead to possible danger for customers, recalls, lasting reputational damage and potentially huge financial losses.

For example, in 2013, unsafe levels of the insecticide malathion was found in a Japanese frozen food company’s product after customers reported a chemical smell coming from the products and almost 3,000 incidences of sickness from consuming them. As a result, the products were recalled and the company shut down, causing its stock to plummet.

Why does it happen?
The main motive for tampering with food products is to make a statement. Bad actors aim to cause injury or economic and reputational harm to companies, especially since news of these acts can go viral, creating the negative impact on companies they hope to achieve.

As with cases of cybercrime, these companies are in a sense being “hacked” and need protection. Like with the mysterious hacker, manufacturers and retailers are facing this threat from both inside and outside the organization.

Oftentimes an employee within the company is the culprit, such as in the case of Just Bare Whole Chicken. A recall of 55,608 pounds of chicken sold nationwide went into effect last June, after black sand and soil was found in some Gold’n Plump and Just Bare branded poultry. The employee responsible was identified and terminated, but the effects of the disruption were lasting.

Taking Preventative Measures
Food companies should have a full understanding of the risks they face, the insurance available, and the regulations associated with product tampering.

Insurance: Malicious Product Tampering (MPT) insurance addresses deliberate contamination, or the threat of such contamination of products when a company or the public has a reasonable belief that the products might cause bodily injury if consumed. MPT insurance should be considered as part of a total product recall risk management solution. Many of these insurance programs provide experienced crisis management consultants to help a company manage and recover from such incidents efficiently and effectively in order to minimize loss. When putting together a risk management program, make sure to have first and third party coverage for product recall, including malicious contamination, business interruption, product extortion, product recall costs, rehabilitation expenses, replacement costs and consultant costs.

Defense initiatives: There is a difference between food safety processes, which protect food from unintentional contamination by products that are present in the production plant, and food defense initiatives, which protect from intentional tampering by unknown substances. Some people use the terms interchangeably, but food defense is key to protecting against tampering.

In 2016, the FDA issued a final rule on Mitigation Strategies to Protect Food Against Intentional Adulteration and, as part of this initiative, released the Food Defense Plan Builder program, which assists food facility owners and operators with developing personalized food defense plans. This user-friendly tool should be quite valuable to your food defense strategy.

Regulation: The Food Safety and Modernization Act aims to ensure that the U.S. food supply is safe by focusing on preventing contamination before it happens rather than simply responding to it. It requires mitigation strategies to be put in place in certain food facilities.

With these risk management strategies and the right insurance plan in place, companies can protect themselves and help mitigate their risks of food or product tampering.

Falling Trees Can Cause Property Damage, Injury or Death

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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

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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.”