It is known that some quiescence precedes the strong events in the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld sand-pile (Pepke and Carlson, 1994) We introduce dissipation depending on the propagation of the events into this model such that in the constructed model the growth of activity occurs before the strong events. This fact allows the prediction of them in advance with a certain efficiency. This efficiency is variable in time. The best predictability is observed during subcritical time ranges, while the efficiency is definitely worse in the supercritical state.