  As a model of composite material, the fiber bundle model has been chosen
-where a bundle of fibers is subjected to external load and fibers have
distributed thresholds. For different loading conditions, such a system shows
few precursors which indicate that the complete failure is imminent. When
external load is increased quasi-statically - \textit{bursts} (number of
failing fibers) of different sizes are produced. The burst statistics shows a
robust crossover behavior near the failure point, around which the average
burst size seems to diverge. If the load is increased by discrete steps,
susceptibility and relaxation time diverge as failure point is approached. When
the bundle is overloaded (external load is more than critical load) the rate of
breaking shows a minimum at half way to the collapse point. The pattern and
statistics of energy emission bursts show characteristic difference for
below-critical and over-critical load levels.
