Headlines February
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Failed system led to launch chunk of ice on car in Farmsum
A system failure led to a wind turbine in Farmsum launching a large chunk of ice in December. It landed on a car and the driver escaped with shock.
The windmill has a system that should warn when ice forms in the mill, but it failed, an investigation by the province of Groningen now shows.
The chunk of ice landed on the windscreen of Anne-Wil Brontsema's car. She was not injured, but was greatly shocked. "There's also a cycle path next to the road there, eh. I did think, if you get such a lump on your head, you're really dead," she told RTV Noord.
It happened on Saturday afternoon, 17 December last year. The temperature was just below freezing. Brontsema was driving on the N992 from her home town of Woldendorp to the supermarket.
"Grocery shopping. I didn't see anything coming. Suddenly there was a bang. What is this, I thought. It was quite clear that something very heavy had fallen on that windscreen. It also bulged all the way towards me. So something must have fallen from the sky. Something from or of a plane, I thought at first." "A car did drive behind me, and that man saw it all happen. It came from a windmill, he said. Further down the road you could also see more big chunks of ice," she continued. Along the N992, there is a whole row of windmills.
Windmills shut down
The police immediately closed the road after the accident. An hour later, by order of the province, the other wind turbines of the Windpark Zuid Delfzijl along the road were also stopped. An initial investigation by the province now shows that a technical fault was the cause. Each wind turbine is equipped with an ice detection system: a system that warns if there is dangerous ice formation between the blades or elsewhere in or on the turbine. "Based on the ice detection system, a turbine can be shut down so that no dangerous situation arises," Groningen's Provincial Executive (GS) wrote yesterday. "Therefore, there is no reason to immediately shut down every turbine near roads, cycle paths or homes in case of frost. The condition is that the system is functioning properly. In this case, it was not."
Preventing new problems
The provincial government has now started a new investigation together with the Groningen Environment Service and the turbine operators to find out why the system was not functioning. If only "to prevent such a situation from occurring again", GS said. Energy company Engie has contacted Anne-Wil Brontsema and compensated her for the material damage. "She is, understandably, very shocked," a spokesperson said.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462466-falend-systeem-leidde-tot-lancering-brok-ijs-op-auto-in-farmsum
Quarter of a million fine for Tilburg and NedTrain for chromium-6 abuses
Tilburg municipality and NS subsidiary NedTrain must each pay a €250,000 fine for exposing welfare recipients to the dangerous substance chromium-6. The court spoke of "an unacceptable health risk". Between 2004 and 2011, the municipality put over 800 unemployed people to work in a NedTrain workshop. They had to sand paint off old trains as part of their reintegration. The paint contained the carcinogen chromium-6. Some of the unemployed suffered serious health damage. The court blames the two parties for never having investigated the possible risks of exposure to the paint, while it was generally known that old paint can contain dangerous substances. The municipality and NedTrain thus took an unacceptable risk, the court said.
According to the court, the municipality and NedTrain seriously failed in their duty of care. For instance, the participants were not provided with information and the right personal protective equipment to work with chromium-6. "NedTrain's workshop was not equipped to work with hazardous substances. When sanding, huge amounts of dust were released. Participants were obliged to do the work because otherwise their benefits would be cut or stopped," said the presiding judge in Rotterdam. "Both allowed this situation to continue for far too long without investigating possible health risks for the participants."
Higher fine
The court took advantage of a rule in the criminal code that allows a higher fine than can actually be imposed. The maximum amount would actually be 74,000 euros, but that, according to the court, is too little for the two organisations with huge budgets. Therefore, the maximum fine of 250,000 euros was imposed on both parties, reports Omroep Brabant. About the Tilburg municipality, the court also said that it has an exemplary role as a government organisation.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462090-kwart-miljoen-boete-voor-tilburg-en-nedtrain-voor-misstanden-met-chroom-6
Major ING failure was caused by miscommunication internal systems
The major ING outage on 1 February was caused by internal systems of the bank that could no longer work together. The bank reported this after analysing the outage. The outage made it impossible to bank online for over 13 hours, both via the app and the site. According to ING, an additional problem was that the data of five million ING customers from the Netherlands had been moved to new systems for the bank's mobile app. That would have led to changes in the internal network traffic, causing a certain part of the network to be loaded differently and exhibit glitches.
ING eventually took the app offline to implement solutions. "This long unavailability should never have happened. Customers should be able to count on a functioning service," said an ING spokesperson. The spokesperson could not say how many customers were ultimately affected by the outage. "If customers believe they have been harmed, they can contact us. There are regular complaint forms for that, as with any outage." ING does not disclose how many complaints were received following the outage.
Source: https://www.nu.nl/tech/6251823/grote-ing-storing-werd-veroorzaakt-door-miscommunicatie-interne-systemen.html
Fifteen hours of no online banking at ING: 'We're not used to it anymore'
Checking your balance or transferring money online: for nearly 9 million ING customers, it was impossible to do so all day yesterday. It was due to a more than 15-hour online outage at the bank, which caused a lot of frustration among users and forced the ceo to apologise. What happened? Five questions and answers.
How often does this happen?
First of all: online failures at banks happen regularly. But where they usually last at most a few hours, this outage was more extensive. All customers were affected for 15 hours. Over 500,000 complaints came in to Allestoringen.nl. By comparison, the largest ING outage in the past five years received 80,000 reports. CEO Steven van Rijswijk said he could not remember a bigger ING outage than Wednesday's. He called the situation very annoying. "We are a bank that champions digital services, so we are very unhappy about this," he said. That banks profile themselves as online businesses has a background, says Marieke Huisman, professor of software reliability at the University of Twente. "Banks used to provide financial services, now they are mainly software-intensive companies. Those systems were never developed with the idea that it would be so important."
What happened?
According to the bank, something went wrong in the communication between servers of the app and those of the website. How this could happen is not yet clear. ING does say that it was all hands on deck: 200 IT people were immediately put to work to solve the problem. When this was still unsuccessful in the evening, they had to be relieved by 200 others. Huisman takes a stab at the cause. According to her, ING certainly looks at software development and they pay a lot of attention to it. "But software nowadays has to be finished quickly. Moreover, all software contains errors, sometimes very subtle ones. Then it is very difficult to find out what went wrong."
What are the consequences for the bank?
According to Betaalvereniging Nederland, there is no legal availability standard for online banking; there is one for debit cards and iDEAL. "However, there is an agreement that a fault with online banking or mobile banking must be fixed within two hours. That is mainly a best-efforts obligation," says a spokesperson. On this, ING says it wants to be "up and running online 99 per cent of the time". But because of this outage, the company is not going to achieve that this month, according to Van Rijswijk. He says it is difficult to determine what financial damage the outage has caused the bank. "It is mainly loss of reputation, customers are dissatisfied. That is difficult to calculate."
How many customers have been duped?
Thuiswinkel.org, the trade association of online shops, says it has not received any major complaints from members. ING also assumes that the damage is limited because in-store PIN payments and automatic payments could continue as usual. According to Betalingsverkeer Nederland, customers' inconvenience is mainly due to the habit of being online a lot and quickly. "We have all become used to being able to make payments quickly and instantly 24 hours a day. If your bank doesn't work for a few hours now, the world is too small. The volume of payments makes it stand out." The spokesperson points out that very often things do work out. "It's also habituation," he says. "Thanks to mobile banking apps on smartphones, we look at our account a lot and often. We also call this boredom banking, a term once coined by ING. Looking at the banking app during some idle minutes. And if we can't, it still leads to inconvenience."
As a customer, can you get money back?
If people have suffered direct losses then we will look into that, says ING. "But I don't know if people couldn't get payments to go through yesterday that are going through now." Online, customers are asking the same question: will we be compensated? There, they are referred to the general terms and conditions, which state that the bank does not compensate anything in the event of an outage.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462228-vijftien-uur-niet-online-bankieren-bij-ing-we-zijn-het-niet-meer-gewend
Fire extinguishers caused major fire in Krönnenzommer care centre
The major fire at the Krönnenzommer care centre was probably caused by fire extinguishers. This is the conclusion of the fire brigade and police some four months after the fire, writes care organisation ZorgAccent in a press statement. It went wrong when a resident accidentally set off a so-called aerosol extinguisher. The fire at the Sanatoriumlaan site caused chaos among residents. More than 60 people - mostly frail elderly people - had to be evacuated in a hurry. The property was difficult for emergency services to reach because it is in the woods outside Hellendoorn. Two residents were taken to hospital that evening because they had inhaled smoke.
Small water droplets
It started with a restless resident accidentally activating an aerosol extinguisher on Sunday evening. This creates an ignition, releasing sparks and heat into the extinguisher. Very small water droplets are then released (aerosol), which look like smoke. This activated the fire alarm, after which the fire doors closed and the fire brigade was alerted. FAFS officers on the scene mistook the aerosol cloud for smoke and threw four new extinguishers at the 'smoke'. One landed near a lined seat, which caught fire after which the big fire started.
'Handled well'
Meanwhile, evacuation was in full swing. "The FAFS officers could not possibly assess whether there was actually a fire and observed the aerosol as smoke spread," ZorgAccent said in a press statement. The organisation stresses that its own staff did a good job. This was "confirmed in all interviews and investigation reports by the fire brigade, police and the safety region".
ZorgAccent says it will no longer use the aerosol extinguishers on the advice of the fire brigade. "All employees have been informed about this and the aerosol extinguishers will be removed from all ZorgAccent locations in a short period of time. BHV training has also been adjusted accordingly with immediate effect."
Source: https://www.rtvoost.nl/nieuws/2197831/brandblussers-veroorzaakten-grote-brand-in-zorgcentrum-kronnenzommer-hellendoorn
A system failure led to a wind turbine in Farmsum launching a large chunk of ice in December. It landed on a car and the driver escaped with shock.
The windmill has a system that should warn when ice forms in the mill, but it failed, an investigation by the province of Groningen now shows.
The chunk of ice landed on the windscreen of Anne-Wil Brontsema's car. She was not injured, but was greatly shocked. "There's also a cycle path next to the road there, eh. I did think, if you get such a lump on your head, you're really dead," she told RTV Noord.
It happened on Saturday afternoon, 17 December last year. The temperature was just below freezing. Brontsema was driving on the N992 from her home town of Woldendorp to the supermarket.
"Grocery shopping. I didn't see anything coming. Suddenly there was a bang. What is this, I thought. It was quite clear that something very heavy had fallen on that windscreen. It also bulged all the way towards me. So something must have fallen from the sky. Something from or of a plane, I thought at first." "A car did drive behind me, and that man saw it all happen. It came from a windmill, he said. Further down the road you could also see more big chunks of ice," she continued. Along the N992, there is a whole row of windmills.
Windmills shut down
The police immediately closed the road after the accident. An hour later, by order of the province, the other wind turbines of the Windpark Zuid Delfzijl along the road were also stopped. An initial investigation by the province now shows that a technical fault was the cause. Each wind turbine is equipped with an ice detection system: a system that warns if there is dangerous ice formation between the blades or elsewhere in or on the turbine. "Based on the ice detection system, a turbine can be shut down so that no dangerous situation arises," Groningen's Provincial Executive (GS) wrote yesterday. "Therefore, there is no reason to immediately shut down every turbine near roads, cycle paths or homes in case of frost. The condition is that the system is functioning properly. In this case, it was not."
Preventing new problems
The provincial government has now started a new investigation together with the Groningen Environment Service and the turbine operators to find out why the system was not functioning. If only "to prevent such a situation from occurring again", GS said. Energy company Engie has contacted Anne-Wil Brontsema and compensated her for the material damage. "She is, understandably, very shocked," a spokesperson said.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462466-falend-systeem-leidde-tot-lancering-brok-ijs-op-auto-in-farmsum
Quarter of a million fine for Tilburg and NedTrain for chromium-6 abuses
Tilburg municipality and NS subsidiary NedTrain must each pay a €250,000 fine for exposing welfare recipients to the dangerous substance chromium-6. The court spoke of "an unacceptable health risk". Between 2004 and 2011, the municipality put over 800 unemployed people to work in a NedTrain workshop. They had to sand paint off old trains as part of their reintegration. The paint contained the carcinogen chromium-6. Some of the unemployed suffered serious health damage. The court blames the two parties for never having investigated the possible risks of exposure to the paint, while it was generally known that old paint can contain dangerous substances. The municipality and NedTrain thus took an unacceptable risk, the court said.
According to the court, the municipality and NedTrain seriously failed in their duty of care. For instance, the participants were not provided with information and the right personal protective equipment to work with chromium-6. "NedTrain's workshop was not equipped to work with hazardous substances. When sanding, huge amounts of dust were released. Participants were obliged to do the work because otherwise their benefits would be cut or stopped," said the presiding judge in Rotterdam. "Both allowed this situation to continue for far too long without investigating possible health risks for the participants."
Higher fine
The court took advantage of a rule in the criminal code that allows a higher fine than can actually be imposed. The maximum amount would actually be 74,000 euros, but that, according to the court, is too little for the two organisations with huge budgets. Therefore, the maximum fine of 250,000 euros was imposed on both parties, reports Omroep Brabant. About the Tilburg municipality, the court also said that it has an exemplary role as a government organisation.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462090-kwart-miljoen-boete-voor-tilburg-en-nedtrain-voor-misstanden-met-chroom-6
Major ING failure was caused by miscommunication internal systems
The major ING outage on 1 February was caused by internal systems of the bank that could no longer work together. The bank reported this after analysing the outage. The outage made it impossible to bank online for over 13 hours, both via the app and the site. According to ING, an additional problem was that the data of five million ING customers from the Netherlands had been moved to new systems for the bank's mobile app. That would have led to changes in the internal network traffic, causing a certain part of the network to be loaded differently and exhibit glitches.
ING eventually took the app offline to implement solutions. "This long unavailability should never have happened. Customers should be able to count on a functioning service," said an ING spokesperson. The spokesperson could not say how many customers were ultimately affected by the outage. "If customers believe they have been harmed, they can contact us. There are regular complaint forms for that, as with any outage." ING does not disclose how many complaints were received following the outage.
Source: https://www.nu.nl/tech/6251823/grote-ing-storing-werd-veroorzaakt-door-miscommunicatie-interne-systemen.html
Fifteen hours of no online banking at ING: 'We're not used to it anymore'
Checking your balance or transferring money online: for nearly 9 million ING customers, it was impossible to do so all day yesterday. It was due to a more than 15-hour online outage at the bank, which caused a lot of frustration among users and forced the ceo to apologise. What happened? Five questions and answers.
How often does this happen?
First of all: online failures at banks happen regularly. But where they usually last at most a few hours, this outage was more extensive. All customers were affected for 15 hours. Over 500,000 complaints came in to Allestoringen.nl. By comparison, the largest ING outage in the past five years received 80,000 reports. CEO Steven van Rijswijk said he could not remember a bigger ING outage than Wednesday's. He called the situation very annoying. "We are a bank that champions digital services, so we are very unhappy about this," he said. That banks profile themselves as online businesses has a background, says Marieke Huisman, professor of software reliability at the University of Twente. "Banks used to provide financial services, now they are mainly software-intensive companies. Those systems were never developed with the idea that it would be so important."
What happened?
According to the bank, something went wrong in the communication between servers of the app and those of the website. How this could happen is not yet clear. ING does say that it was all hands on deck: 200 IT people were immediately put to work to solve the problem. When this was still unsuccessful in the evening, they had to be relieved by 200 others. Huisman takes a stab at the cause. According to her, ING certainly looks at software development and they pay a lot of attention to it. "But software nowadays has to be finished quickly. Moreover, all software contains errors, sometimes very subtle ones. Then it is very difficult to find out what went wrong."
What are the consequences for the bank?
According to Betaalvereniging Nederland, there is no legal availability standard for online banking; there is one for debit cards and iDEAL. "However, there is an agreement that a fault with online banking or mobile banking must be fixed within two hours. That is mainly a best-efforts obligation," says a spokesperson. On this, ING says it wants to be "up and running online 99 per cent of the time". But because of this outage, the company is not going to achieve that this month, according to Van Rijswijk. He says it is difficult to determine what financial damage the outage has caused the bank. "It is mainly loss of reputation, customers are dissatisfied. That is difficult to calculate."
How many customers have been duped?
Thuiswinkel.org, the trade association of online shops, says it has not received any major complaints from members. ING also assumes that the damage is limited because in-store PIN payments and automatic payments could continue as usual. According to Betalingsverkeer Nederland, customers' inconvenience is mainly due to the habit of being online a lot and quickly. "We have all become used to being able to make payments quickly and instantly 24 hours a day. If your bank doesn't work for a few hours now, the world is too small. The volume of payments makes it stand out." The spokesperson points out that very often things do work out. "It's also habituation," he says. "Thanks to mobile banking apps on smartphones, we look at our account a lot and often. We also call this boredom banking, a term once coined by ING. Looking at the banking app during some idle minutes. And if we can't, it still leads to inconvenience."
As a customer, can you get money back?
If people have suffered direct losses then we will look into that, says ING. "But I don't know if people couldn't get payments to go through yesterday that are going through now." Online, customers are asking the same question: will we be compensated? There, they are referred to the general terms and conditions, which state that the bank does not compensate anything in the event of an outage.
Source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2462228-vijftien-uur-niet-online-bankieren-bij-ing-we-zijn-het-niet-meer-gewend
Fire extinguishers caused major fire in Krönnenzommer care centre
The major fire at the Krönnenzommer care centre was probably caused by fire extinguishers. This is the conclusion of the fire brigade and police some four months after the fire, writes care organisation ZorgAccent in a press statement. It went wrong when a resident accidentally set off a so-called aerosol extinguisher. The fire at the Sanatoriumlaan site caused chaos among residents. More than 60 people - mostly frail elderly people - had to be evacuated in a hurry. The property was difficult for emergency services to reach because it is in the woods outside Hellendoorn. Two residents were taken to hospital that evening because they had inhaled smoke.
Small water droplets
It started with a restless resident accidentally activating an aerosol extinguisher on Sunday evening. This creates an ignition, releasing sparks and heat into the extinguisher. Very small water droplets are then released (aerosol), which look like smoke. This activated the fire alarm, after which the fire doors closed and the fire brigade was alerted. FAFS officers on the scene mistook the aerosol cloud for smoke and threw four new extinguishers at the 'smoke'. One landed near a lined seat, which caught fire after which the big fire started.
'Handled well'
Meanwhile, evacuation was in full swing. "The FAFS officers could not possibly assess whether there was actually a fire and observed the aerosol as smoke spread," ZorgAccent said in a press statement. The organisation stresses that its own staff did a good job. This was "confirmed in all interviews and investigation reports by the fire brigade, police and the safety region".
ZorgAccent says it will no longer use the aerosol extinguishers on the advice of the fire brigade. "All employees have been informed about this and the aerosol extinguishers will be removed from all ZorgAccent locations in a short period of time. BHV training has also been adjusted accordingly with immediate effect."
Source: https://www.rtvoost.nl/nieuws/2197831/brandblussers-veroorzaakten-grote-brand-in-zorgcentrum-kronnenzommer-hellendoorn
Translated from Dutch to English with Google translate