Comments on: A comparative guidebook to grenades in Great Lakes capital cities http://www.jinamoore.com/2010/06/14/comparative-guidebook-grenades-great-lakes-capital-cities/ Reporter & Producer Thu, 10 May 2012 22:24:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Laura http://www.jinamoore.com/2010/06/14/comparative-guidebook-grenades-great-lakes-capital-cities/#comment-950 Laura Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:46:34 +0000 http://www.jinamoore.com/?p=1536#comment-950 Glad everyone in Bujumbura's bearing up well! Thought that if this is going to be a regular occurance you might be interested to know what to do if someone throws a grenade at you, which, by coincidence, I've just been reading about in my NGO's safety handbook. So: turn so you have your back to the grenade, take one step, and drop to the ground. This is because a) the range of a grenade is about 30m so it's unlikely you'd get away before it went off, and b) what kills you is the blast, not the shrapnel, so it's best to minimise the surface area exposed to the blast - plus the shrapnel blows in a hemisphere, so lying flat is still a good place to be. Also: my bet is on the government. According to the rumour mill they've been paying up youth gangs do destabilise the situaiton and scare people into voting for them since last summer if not before. And just because it's a bit daft doesn't make it any less likely that they'd do it. Glad everyone in Bujumbura's bearing up well! Thought that if this is going to be a regular occurance you might be interested to know what to do if someone throws a grenade at you, which, by coincidence, I've just been reading about in my NGO's safety handbook. So: turn so you have your back to the grenade, take one step, and drop to the ground. This is because a) the range of a grenade is about 30m so it's unlikely you'd get away before it went off, and b) what kills you is the blast, not the shrapnel, so it's best to minimise the surface area exposed to the blast - plus the shrapnel blows in a hemisphere, so lying flat is still a good place to be.

Also: my bet is on the government. According to the rumour mill they've been paying up youth gangs do destabilise the situaiton and scare people into voting for them since last summer if not before. And just because it's a bit daft doesn't make it any less likely that they'd do it.

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