The National Transportation Safety Board is sending a technical specialist to observe Tesla Inc.’s examination of a Model S that caught fire in California on Friday, the agency said in a statement.

The action is not a formal probe of how the lithium-ion battery pack caught fire without being involved a crash, NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said. NTSB’s participation in Tesla’s review “will provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles,” he said.

(TNS) — In the 13 years since Hurricane Katrina hit South Mississippi, much has changed.

A quick drive down U.S. 90 is a constant reminder of the past — the things that are new and that have been rebuilt and the places that are memories of life before the storm.

One of the things that changed significantly besides the landscape is technology. Facebook was in its infancy in 2005, having been launched the year before the storm, and most social media users were using MySpace. It would also be another two years before Apple released the iPhone and helped to usher in the era of smartphones and tablets.

Research suggests the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rocked California wine country in 2014 may have been caused by an expansion of Earth’s crust because of seasonally receding groundwater under the Napa and Sonoma valleys.

The vineyard-filled valleys flank the West Napa Fault, which produced the quake that killed one person, injured several hundred and caused more than $500 million in losses.

An employer with 1,000 employees can expect to lose more than $1 million each year in missed workdays, lower productivity and increased healthcare due to employee fatigue, according to a new survey.

About one-third of all employers report employee injuries and near-misses due to worker fatigue, the National Safety Council survey also found. Half said they have had employees fall asleep on the job.

Global airlines, coming off a record-low accident rate in 2017, need to guard against complacency over safety as heavy growth in travel demand stretches the air transport system, industry leaders warned at a conference this week.

There were no jet crashes in 2017 and 19 fatalities across the sector, while some 301 passengers have died in five crashes over just the first five months of 2018, including the first fatality on a U.S. airline since 2009. The other fatal accidents occurred in Cuba, Russia, Iran and Nepal.

Emergency managers and the many different disciplines and organizations they partner with are working every day to make their communities a safer and better place to be; before, during and after a disaster.

Having cut my teeth here on the West Coast, I have always envied emergency managers who have hurricanes as their worst-case disaster. This is for two reasons. One is that they have a set schedule on the calendar that is identified and known by as the hurricane season, which, by the way, just started on June 1, and was preceded by Tropical Storm Alberto. Evidently Alberto did not get the save-the-date message and arrived a few days early.

(TNS) - On the Big Island of Hawaii, the ongoing eruption of Kilauea volcano is giving residents a lesson in what it's like to live on the flanks of an active volcano.

Fissures oozing lava won't be opening up in southcentral Alaska anytime soon. But the region around Alaska's biggest city is hardly a stranger to volcanic eruptions and the mayhem they can cause.

Security is on the front burner for school districts around the country, but how to make students, faculty and visitors safe is a tricky and touchy subject.

There are multiple layers of possible security, including armed officers, armed teachers, metal detectors, video cameras and visitor management systems. They all have their pluses and/or minuses but there are common denominators in any effort to secure a school or any similar location.

All of the above are just one facet of security and not a guarantee of anything, and the human factor is as important or more so than any other.

What is your organization's biggest security threat? The answer may surprise you.

While most companies imagine security threats in the form of malicious outsiders, the employees already in your organization may pose an even bigger threat. In fact, research suggests that insider threats account for anywhere from 60 to 75 percent of data breaches.

Starbucks Corp. and other roasters and retailers must serve up a cancer warning with coffee sold in California, a Los Angeles judge has ruled.

Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle in a ruling published on Monday said that Starbucks and other coffee sellers did not show that the risk from consuming acrylamide, a possible cancer-causing byproduct created during coffee roasting, was offset by benefits from drinking coffee.