  The article reports a numerical investigation of the breakdown of a
disordered system considering the effect of local stress concentration under
the action of an external tensile force. The statistics of the record-breaking
magnitudes of emitted energies during the failure process, as well as the
waiting time to achieve those record events, show rich behavior. The latter
includes information about the acceleration and subsequent catastrophic failure
through its non-monotonic behavior. The maximum waiting time is also correlated
with the maximum change in elastic energy as the model evolves, a different way
of predicting an upcoming failure, which is consistent with our hypothesis as
well. At a moderate disorder, such a prediction can be done with higher
accuracy while at a low disorder, due to the abrupt nature of the failure
process our hypothesis does not hold well.
