Reposted from

The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) has released its Annual Incident Review Summary and Year End Infographic for 2023. The Annual Incident Review Summary is based on more than 140 wildland fire incident reports and lessons shared with the LLC in 2023. The report condenses information from these reports into 10 pages, highlighting lessons for safer wildland firefighting operations. The Year End Infographic is a 2-page snapshot of the 2023 fire year. It highlights selected lessons learned and provides summary statistics on reported fatalities, near miss incidents, and injuries in 2023. The purpose of these two documents is to promote learning in the wildland fire service, with the recognition that risk cannot always be eliminated, and learning is vital to thriving in high-risk environments. This information may be used to guide annual refreshers and prepare for the 2024 fire year.

The following are some notable findings from 2023:

• Fatalities. There were 13 wildland firefighter fatalities in 2023.
• Significant increase in UTV-involved incidents. Between 2009 and 2022, only about two incidents involving Utility Terrain Vehicles (UTVs) were reported each year on average. In 2023, there were 13 UTV-involved incidents. In 12 of these incidents, a UTV either rolled over or caught fire.
• Burn injuries. There were 16 separate burn injury incidents reported. The most common scenarios resulting in burn injures continue to be drip torch use and falling into hot ash or active flame exposure.

• Hit by tree. 12 tree strikes occurred under a variety of conditions in seven different states. Two UTVs were struck by trees. In multiple instances, trees fell toward hand crews and engine crews.

• Entrapment. There were 12 separate entrapment events. Over 90% of the reported entrapments occurred during initial attack. Seven of those entrapments involved equipment becoming disabled and impacted by fire.

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Reposted from CISA

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is pleased to announce the release of a new resource titled, Violence Prevention through De-escalation Video, to help critical infrastructure and public gathering location stakeholders identify concerning behaviors and mitigate the risk of an incident of targeted violence. This video provides both security and non-security trained professionals with conflict prevention techniques and recommended practices that may augment more traditional security protocols. This approach can help individuals who have observed activities and behaviors that may be considered suspicious or indicative of potentially violent activity.

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Reposted from ArtNews

Two climate protestors threw soup at a Claude Monet painting at the Musee de Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France, on Saturday afternoon. The target of the environmental activists was Monet’s 1872 work Le Printemps (Spring). While the painting was protected by glass, the museum told Le Monde that it would “still undergo a close inspection and restoration.” The Musee de Beaux-Arts also told Le Monde that it would file a complaint for vandalism, and that the two activists had been arrested. The protestors had written on their T-shirts the words Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response), the same group that threw soup at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris earlier this year.

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Reposted from EMR-ISAC

On Feb. 12, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—on behalf of the collective group of industry and government partners that comprise the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC)—released JCDC’s 2024 Priorities. Similar to the 2023 JCDC Planning Agenda, JCDC’s 2024 Priorities will help focus the collective group on developing high-impact and collaborative solutions to the most pressing cybersecurity challenges.

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Reposted from EMR-ISAC

In November 2022, the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and AT&T announced the launch of a new website with the goal of helping communities prepare for future climate extremes. Since the 2022 launch, the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR) has established itself as an award-winning, free, national online source for sophisticated climate data down to the neighborhood level. Community leaders, infrastructure managers, civil engineers and public safety officials can use ClimRR to build resilience against the impacts of future climate hazards like extreme heat, heavy rainfall, wildfire, and drought. This climate-related hazard data can be integrated with local demographic and infrastructure data, so that data on future conditions can be incorporated into Hazard Mitigation Plans, land use plans, infrastructure design, and FEMA’s Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT). Last month, a major update to ClimRR was released. FEMA, ANL, and AT&T hosted a webinar on Feb. 1 on how to use ClimRR’s newly enhanced features. This webinar was recorded and is now available on demand via ANL’s YouTube channel. The webinar showed participants how to:

• Generate a local report assessing future climate hazards and community impacts. The new climate projection page allows you to customize a report for your area, combining variables like population demographics with hazard projections.
• Access maps, charts and visualizations. Create easy-to-understand maps, charts and graphs so you can quickly find and communicate important climate risks facing your community.
• Interpret climate hazard data points. Climate data can be overwhelming to explain and understand. Using the portal’s educational features, participants will learn to identify communities most at risk.

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Reposted from Tim Richardson

The talk of the Super Bowl has been the sideline antics of Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce. After Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco fumbled the ball, Travis Kelce purposely bumped into Coach Andy Reid and yelled “Coach, I sure would enjoy some more playing time!” or something like that before being pulled away by a teammate. Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy was caught on camera just before the outbreak with a warning for his offensive players: “Emotions [are high] right now, just stick together. We got each other,” Nagy said. “That’s who we are. We talked last night about being us and being champions. These are the moments where it doesn’t get too big. Stick together.” The outburst has been categorized as “passion” and “part of the game” by some, while others have vilified it as highly inappropriate and telling of Kelce’s true nature. He was asked about the incident right after the Super Bowl. “Oh you guys saw that? Man, it was…I’m going to keep that between us unless my mic’d-up tells the world, but I was just telling him how much I love him.” It sure appeared Kelce bullied his way to get what he wanted. While doing so, he showed other athletes that yelling at and threatening your coach is acceptable. While Coach Reid later said, “I love it that the guy loves to play “, that doesn’t diminish the fact that Kelce communicated with his coach inappropriately. Reid deescalated the situation by doing the right thing in the moment… nothing. The situation could have been avoided had Kelce simply taken a short pause to gather his thoughts before confronting his coach. That is, understandably, a very difficult to do when emotions are high. That is why having a level-headed leader is so important. They help keep their teams in control. They pause to think and act clearly, and they do so even during heated conversations. 

Early in my career, I led a project with a highly volatile co-worker. While we shared a common work goal, we had different ideas on achieving it. We both had very strong convictions which eventually resulted in a heated argument at work. Because neither of us remained calm, our dispute devolved into an agitated confrontation which strained the rest of our working relationship. In our work and personal lives, we are going to interact with others who have strong convictions and sometimes even strong emotions. If we aren’t careful, we can be dragged into an intense confrontation. Take a lesson from Andy Reid. Always take the high road by keeping in control. You’ll avoid having to clean up a bigger mess later.

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Reposted from CISA

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is launching a new, online Cybersecurity Emotions Video Campaign. Recognizing the challenges faced by the average technology user in adopting online safety practices, this series takes a unique and relatable approach to everyday cybersecurity best practices in four short videos. By translating cybersecurity practices into lively and humorous narratives, CISA aims to build a stronger connection with our audience by fostering awareness and understanding in a way that is both entertaining and educational.

This series centers around four basic cyber hygiene steps everyone can take to be more cybersecure:

1.        Update Your Password

2.      Enable Multifactor Authentication

3.      Think Before Your Click

4.      Update Your Software

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Reposted from The New York Times

The British Museum recovered more than 350 ancient artifacts that were looted from its storerooms and is putting some on show.

For six months, a team at the British Museum has been working with police to recover hundreds of engraved gems and other items of jewelry that museum officials say a former curator stole from its store rooms. The team has also been planning an exhibition. “Rediscovering Gems,” occupying a room by the British Museum’s grand entrance through June 2, includes dozens of the tiny artifacts known as cameos and intaglios — 10 of which are recovered items. Art dealers who bought the stolen items — some of which date back to ancient Rome — have so far returned 357 treasures to the museum, said Aurélia Masson-Berghoff, a curator who is leading the recovery team. Although over 1,000 items are still missing, and could take years to locate, Masson-Berghoff said her team was hopeful that those could be recovered, too. The new exhibition was part of the museum’s efforts to be transparent about the thefts and its efforts to retrieve the items, she added. During a recent tour of the show, Claudia Wagner, the museum’s senior research associate for gems, said that the jewels had long been underappreciated. The tiny artifacts — often less than a half-inch tall — are hard to discern in natural light, making them easy to ignore, she added. In the exhibition hall, small torches are provided so that visitors can see them properly. Some of the museum’s previous Greek and Roman curators had preferred to focus on bigger and more renowned artifacts like statues and vases, Wagner said, which could explain why many of the cameos and intaglios were uncatalogued before the thefts. On the tour of the show, Wagner and Masson-Berghoff discussed the origins of these precious gems, their uses in ancient times and how they once entranced Europe’s art connoisseurs.

These are edited extracts of that conversation. WAGNER The first engraved gems were what’s called intaglios — where the design is carved into the gem or glass. They were used as seals, so people would push them into wet clay — the equivalent of writing your signature. They were invented in Mesopotamia, but it’s the ancient Greeks who make them into their own art form, and because the Greeks were so interested in mythology, you immediately have all the gods represented. If you look very, very closely at this tiny little figure, he has an ivy wreath in his hair. That’s because this is Bacchus, the god of wine.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

Emergency repairs are being made to several galleries, just over a year after Assyrian reliefs were threatened by serious condensation. The British Museum is suffering an endless series of leaks from roofs that were built decades ago. The sight of buckets to catch drips is now commonplace and extra heaters are needed in some galleries to reduce humidity levels in winter. George Osborne, the chair of the museum’s trustees, admitted in a speech last November that for decades the building “has been patched up in a piecemeal way and by closing galleries when the rain comes in”. Osborne is pushing for an ambitious masterplan to upgrade the whole building, starting with the galleries in what is known as the Western Range—which houses mainly Greek and Assyrian antiquities on the ground floor. This includes the large room with the Parthenon Marbles, which have long been claimed by the Greeks. Although a project to build a new energy center, to be partly funded with a controversial £50m donation from BP, was announced in December, progress on the masterplan for the galleries has slowed down as a result of the scandal over the theft of 2,000 Greek and Roman artefacts. The museum is without a permanent director to lead the project and fundraising will remain difficult until confidence in the institution is properly restored. Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper can report that emergency repairs are being made to roofs above galleries 17 (Greek Nereid monument), 19 (Athenian antiquities), 72 (Ancient Cyprus) and 92-94 (Japan).

In a planning application to Camden Council last year, the museum stated that urgent work is required “to mitigate water ingress which is… putting the integrity of the building and the collection at risk of significant damage” and to tackle risks to “public safety”. A related problem concerns humidity levels. We can reveal that in December 2022 the important Assyrian reliefs were threatened by serious condensation, when unusual meteorological conditions led to moisture forming on the surface of the ninth-century BC sculptures. Emergency measures were required to dry them out and prevent any permanent damage. These reliefs are now particularly precious, because of the loss of similar panels in Iraq that were destroyed by Islamic State extremists in 2015. Dampness has also created problems for the museum’s central archive. This meant these invaluable historic records had to be moved in 2017 from its basement store and were put in temporary storage in the round reading room, which remains closed to visitors. A museum spokesperson points out that the museum is 270 years old “and we have been open about the fact it is in need of full-scale renovation”. The masterplan represents “one of the most significant cultural redevelopment projects undertaken anywhere in the world”. Funding will be a serious challenge in moving ahead. Although no figures or dates have been divulged, the total cost could well exceed £1bn for the entire building and take several decades. An international architectural competition to transform the Western Range, which represents 7,500 square meters, a third of all the galleries, is due to be launched later this spring. Since the Bloomsbury building is listed for its architectural importance, any changes will require planning permission, but the hope is that it may still be possible to introduce some contemporary architecture and innovative gallery displays. Building work is due to start earlier on a new energy center, adjacent to the Western Range. Among the issues that will need to be considered is dealing with any unexploded Second World War bombs. During that conflict the museum was severely damaged by six German bombs and others may have fallen undetected. A preliminary survey has revealed that there is a “medium risk” of unexploded ordnance in a few small specific areas of the museum, so proper procedures will be followed to avoid any risks while building work is underway.

Meanwhile, the hunt goes on for a new director, following the resignation last August of Hartwig Fischer over the Greek and Roman theft. In September Mark Jones, a former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, stepped in as interim director. The new directorship post was advertised, with a 26 January deadline for applications. Interviews will shortly be underway, and an appointment will hopefully be made by April. The successful candidate is likely to have to give notice to leave their present job, so a successor will probably not be in post before the summer. Their main tasks will be to restore faith in the institution and press ahead with the early stages of the masterplan.

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