Search CompleteMarkets

...icans receiving some form of home health care....

... of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). The first thou... it comes to occupational safety and health and risk management.

...ers and managers, and improve the health of workers. Fungi, a biological cont...ding fungus-free - and its occupants healthy.

... Association and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) prov...

California’s worst drought in decades is feeding what may become a devastating wildfire season, one that is starting about five months early. Extremely dry conditions have sparked 487 wildfires so far in 2014, compared with only 2 for the same period a year ago, according to the state Forestry and Fire Protection Department, known as Cal Fire. Potential power failures, home losses, lost tourism dollars and crop damage could jeopardize the world’s 10th largest economy as California struggles to emerge from the deepest recession since the 1930s. “Having this occur statewide is unprecedented, certainly in my career,” Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlott, who started out as a firefighter almost 30 years ago, said in a telephone interview last week. “We anticipate the potential for a very long and sustained fire season throughout the rest of the year.” For a state already reeling from a drought that officials say could be one of the worst in California’s history, fires would only add to the misery. They could damage critical power lines and cause blackouts, disrupt water supplies and destroy sensitive ecosystems, said Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California at Berkeley. Last year, prolonged dry conditions led to the third- largest fire in California’s history. The “Rim Fire” shut power lines and hydroelectric generators, charred parts of Yosemite National Park and threatened the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir watershed, which supplies 85 percent of the drinking water to San Francisco. ‘Poster Child’ The Rim Fire has become the “poster child” for future wildfires in California and the U.S. West, according to a 2013 report from CoreLogic Inc., a real estate data and analytics firm. Homes valued at about $78 billion in total are at risk from wildfires, estimates CoreLogic. Fires could even pose a risk for the state’s $22 billion wine industry. In 2008, smoke from smoldering wildfires in Mendocino County contaminated crops of pinot noir grapes, said Bill Pauli, a grower and general partner of Yokayo Wine Company in Ukiah, California. “Some wines had the odor of someone who had been standing next to a barbecue,” Pauli said in a telephone interview. “It was not a good situation and we all hope it doesn’t happen again.” Extra Firefighters Fire season usually begins around May and typically ends in November with the onset of winter storms, according to Cal Fire. This year, the department says it has hired 125 additional firefighters, staffed 25 extra fire engines and retained crews and aircraft that would normally be idle this time of year. The state has banned campfires and smoking in several parks. “Right now, all of our planning is for the worst-case scenario,” said Pimlott of Cal Fire. “We want to make sure we are ready.” The wildfire danger is of more concern to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti than the prospect of running out of water because of the drought, he said during an interview at Bloomberg News’s Los Angeles office. “I think we are going to see fire season around the clock for much of the year,” Garcetti said. “We are going to have to keep deployments much higher.” The city expects to spend an extra $12 million this year on fire department coverage due to the dry conditions, Garcetti said. Transmission Lines At the same time, utilities including PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric are implementing plans normally reserved for high-fire season, such as stepping up patrols of electrical lines and bringing fire crews along for routine repairs. “Wildfires are always a risk in California,” said Alvin Thoma, director of power generation at San Francisco-based PG&E. “With the dry conditions we’ve had, the soil moisture content right now is much lower than usual, so that makes wildfires much more of a concern.” The California ISO, the state grid operator, said it will keep an “eagle eye” on high-voltage transmission lines, which will be needed to import more power this summer to make up for dwindling hydro-electric supplies and the retirement of a 2,200- megawatt nuclear plant in Southern California. The state typically imports one-quarter of its power needs, according to the ISO. “The wild card is always fires,” said Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for California ISO. “They can affect the transmission and that literally cuts imports that we can’t afford to lose.” Extra Vigilant If lines go down, the grid operator can reroute electricity and ramp up local generation production, McCorkle said. Edison International’s Southern California Edison utility, owner of the San Onofre nuclear plant that was retired last year, will need to be extra vigilant if the dry conditions continue, said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ted Craver. “You can’t say there wouldn’t be some combination of events, a heat storm and a fire that takes out a transmission line,” Craver said in a telephone interview. Upgrades to power networks and new gas generation that has come online in the past two years will help “the grid to be able to withstand the shocks,” Craver said. Although rainstorms in the past week have provided some respite, the odds are that the drought will persist along with the risk of more wildfires, according to Cal Fire. “Everybody is probably sitting back on pins and needles,” said Thomas Jeffery, a senior hazard scientist at CoreLogic. “The potential for a really disastrous wildfire season is very high.” Content provided by http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/west/2014/02/11/244295.htm

U.S. states plagued by historic drought are bracing for an early wildfire season with a cost that may rise as high as $1.8 billion, or almost $500,000 more than what’s available to control the blazes. Oklahomans fought seven fires in May during what is normally the state’s quietest period. Flames scorched four times as many acres in Texas from January through May as in the same period a year earlier. California is also far ahead of its usual pace and is bracing for hundreds more containment battles throughout the most populous U.S. state. “Drought has set the stage for a very busy and very dangerous fire season,” said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for Cal Fire, as the Sacramento-based California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is known. “From Jan. 1 through the end of April, we responded to 1,250 wildfires. In an average year for that same time period, we would have responded to fewer than 600.” The 2014 season is repeating a pattern of destruction established over the past decade by a combination of high temperatures, parched vegetation and more people living in wooded areas. Fires feeding on plentiful dry grass, brush and hardwood are requiring more personnel and money to bring them under control. More than twice as many acres burned across the U.S. through May 9 this year than during the same period in 2013, according to the Boise, Idaho-based National Interagency Fire Center. “With climate change contributing to longer and more intense wildfire seasons, the dangers and costs of fighting those fires increase substantially,” Rhea Suh, assistant secretary for policy, management and budget at the U.S. Interior Department said May 1 in a statement. Diverting Funds Federal officials expect to spend about $470 million more than the $1.4 billion that’s been allocated, according to a congressionally-mandated report released May 1. Increasing fire costs required the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department to divert funds from other programs in seven of the last 12 years, the study showed. Millions of additional dollars in state and local funds are spent each year on persistent and ever- increasing blazes. In Arizona, last year’s record-setting fire season saw 19 members of the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew — firefighters who work behind the lines to control the spread of flames — die in the Yarnell Hill fire, the biggest loss of life from a single fire in 80 years. Colorado experienced its most destructive wildfire in history. A conflagration in Yosemite National Park that threatened San Francisco’s water supply became the largest ever in the Sierra Nevada. Snowpack Low With snowpack that provides water for a third of California’s farms and cities at only 18 percent of average in some places after the driest year in state history, officials expect to spend $221 million in emergency funds fighting fires by June 30, said Cal Fire’s Berlant. In a normal year, the agency would start hiring seasonal firefighters this month. Instead, Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat running for re-election, ordered 125 firefighters hired for the northern part of the state in January and kept seasonal crews in the south on the job longer. Cal Fire was “never able to transition out of fire season in 2013,” according to a statement. The agency returned to peak staffing in March in San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where equipment and facilities are staffed around the clock. Dead brush and shrubs are drying out faster than usual in conditions more typical of mid-June than May, according to an outlook for May through August compiled by the interagency fire center. "Fuels should remain critically dry for most of the upcoming fire season,” the report said, and be “receptive to ignition and fires that are highly resistant to control efforts.” The risk of significant blazes will also come earlier than usual over much of the U.S. northwest, particularly in Oregon and Alaska, the outlook found. Because of substantial snowpack, the fire potential in the northern Rocky Mountains will be below normal, according to the analysis. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat running for re-election, said yesterday that several fire-prone areas saw below-average precipitation this winter including the southwest and the southeast, in the grip of an extreme drought. ‘Mitigate Danger’ “It’s up to everyone to make sure they are taking the right steps to mitigate the danger and be prepared,” Hickenlooper said in a statement. “With forecasts and planning, plus the addition of new resources related to wildfire response, we are doing what we can at the state level.” After record-setting wildfire seasons back-to-back, Hickenlooper signed legislation setting aside almost $20 million to buy two fire-spotting planes and hire four helicopters and four large tankers for the effort. Triple-digit temperatures that came early this year to the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma dried grasses on what already looked like a moonscape, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dust Bowl-like conditions in those areas and in southeastern Colorado and northern New Mexico, last seen during the 1930s, are increasing fire risk, he said. “The droughts in California and Texas and Oklahoma are once-in-a-generation types of droughts with conditions we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” Svoboda said. “In California, the population has doubled since the 1970s, putting more structures at risk and increasing the potential loss due to fire. Content provided by http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2014/05/13/328902.htm

...of prescription painkillers costs Health insurers more than $70 billion a year...s problem. The federal Department of Health and Human Services regulates Opioi...

If you're "it" when it comes to risk management for your business, there's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. How do you determine the best place to start, given limited time and money, to keep your workers safe and keep your company in compliance? Where should you focus? How do you make sure that you stay on top of everything? There are several important steps you can take to have a world-class safety program, even without many people on your team: Determine the managerial perspective on risk management. This is the single most important thing to do because it will set the tone for your ability to drive the risk management initiatives of your company. Do everything you can to make this attitude proactive, rather than reactive. Analyze the current state of safety in the business. An initial SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) will prove invaluable for planning risk management. Review the mission statement and overall goals of the organization to help align the safety process. The results will determine the direction to go; whether it's compliance, the creation of a safety management system, or some combination of the two. To take the program to another level, take a careful look at how you need to integrate safety into the process. Understand the OSHA standards that apply to your business - and make sure that everyone in the organization is familiar with the basics of these regulations. Evaluate your safety plan from a business perspective. Develop a budget that measures your financial return on investment. We're always ready to help - just give us a call.

Monte Vista Christian School to donate portions of proceeds from event Watsonville >> The Monte Vista Christian School performing arts department is putting on a Disney-themed concert to raise the spirits of children with cancer as well as funds for Jacob's Heart. The Watsonville-based private school's show Friday at the Mello Center for the Performing Arts, 250 E. Beach St. in Watsonville, will feature a number of songs from the Disney repertoire with a strong focus on the latest animated movie, "Frozen." Proceeds from the concert will go to Jacob's Heart, the Watsonville-based nonprofit that helps children with cancer and their families. "Since the concern is basically for the children (at Jacob's Heart), we're going to make it a Disney-themed concert," said Tony Dehner, director of vocal arts at Monte Vista. It's the first time Monte Vista has organized a concert fundraiser, according to Dehner. The idea was sparked from a conversation Dehner had with Watsonville Police Chief Manny Solano. The two spoke at a dinner event in November to celebrate Solano's 18-year-old son, who attends Monte Vista and sings in the school's choir, making it into the California regional honor choir. "We're Facebook buddies so he had been following the various stories through my wife's posting of my updates," Solano said, referencing his own battle with cancer. Solano publicly revealed his cancer diagnosis in August and took a three-month leave of absence from the police department to focus on treatment. During the conversation, Solano talked about his cancer battle and Jacob's Heart, which Solano has been a strong advocate and supporter of, came up in the discussion. Eventually Dehner suggested a fundraiser for the nonprofit and, soon, the concert was conceived. "It's just been a great opportunity to bring people together," Solano said. Though the school hosts a spring concert each year, it has traditionally taken place at the high school's auditorium. The decision to change venues to the Mello Center was prompted in part because of the expected number of attendees. The concert will feature two sections. The first half will focus on popular and classic songs and a second half will focus on Disney songs. Songs from "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" movies are in the first part of the program as well as a song by Led Zeppelin. The Disney portion of the show will feature 20 characters from the franchise, all in costume, Dehner said. "I'm pretty sure we're going to sell out," he said. Children from Jacob's Heart and their families are expected to attend the show, free of charge, Dehner said. About 170 Monte Vista students will take part in the performance, including three choirs, the vocal ensemble, the jazz band, the orchestra, the high school band, the dance team and the handbell choir. "The guests will be treated to really quality and incredible music and singing that is right here in our own backyard," Solano said. All tickets are $10. For details and ticket reservations, call 831-728-2711. What: Monte Vista Christian School hosting a concert fundraiser for Jacob's Heart When: 7:30 p.m., Friday 5/16 Where: Mello Center for Performing Arts, 250 E. Beach St. in Watsonville Detail: Call 831-728-2711. Content provided by http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/watsonville/ci_25755193/watsonville-school-hosts-fundraiser-jacobs-heart

The fastest-growing white-collar crime in the United States is identity fraud. ID fraud is when someone commits a crime or fraud in your name using your stolen personal information. No one, regardless of background or financial status, is immune to identity fraud and various cyber threats continue to grow with no sign of slowing down. If your identity is stolen, it can affect your finances, credit history and reputation. Take Action Immediately: Flag your credit reports. Contact the fraud department of one of the three major credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion). Tell them you are an identity theft victim. Ask them to place a "fraud" alert in your file and confirm that they will contact the other two companies. Get copies. Ask for a copy of the credit report. They are required to give you a free copy of your report if it is inaccurate because of fraud. Consider requesting a credit freeze. You might want to place a credit freeze on your credit file, which means that potential creditors cannot get your credit report. This makes it less likely that a potential identity thief can open accounts in your name. First, contact your state’s Attorney General’s office, then contact each credit reporting company. Contact creditors. Contact your creditors about any accounts that have been changed or opened fraudulently. Ask to speak with someone in the security or fraud department. File a report. File a report with your local police. Get a copy of the police report, so you have proof of the crime. Keep Records. Keep records of your conversations and all correspondence. Get more information. For more information regarding identity theft, visit the following websites:Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (You can also call: 1-877-IDTHEFT (438-4338)) FTC Identity Theft Online Complaint Form www.fraud.org (You can also call: 1-800-876-7060) You can also call the FTC’s Identity Theft Hotline at 1-877-IDTHEFT (438-4338).