{"id":6692,"date":"2020-07-13T11:02:25","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T11:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/dutch\/?p=6692"},"modified":"2020-07-13T11:02:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T11:02:25","slug":"knalplanga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/dutch\/knalplanga\/","title":{"rendered":"Knalplanga!"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 4th was a little more than a week ago. Happy late 4th of July, dear Americans! It’s a day with parties, events and fireworks – and during the pandemic mostly the latter. But fireworks lead to injuries each year, even deaths<\/a>. In the Netherlands, we have such issues too. Not in July, but in December, when the\u00a0vuurwerk\u00a0<\/em>(fireworks) go off to welcome the new year. Eyes, fingers, arms, legs… There are\u00a0verwondingen\u00a0<\/em>(injuries) of all kinds, and none of them are pleasant or pretty. But the Dutch government might have found a useful way to reduce such injuries: the\u00a0knalplanga<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Het is net een oorlog!<\/strong><\/em><\/h2>\n

Every year, eye doctors around complain how crazy the amount of eye injuries is. Hundreds of people around the country (remember that the Netherlands is tiny – it’s quite a number for us!) have eye injuries every year. During the Iraq war, about 500 eye injuries were recorded, a number the Dutch reach in 2 to 3 years with Oud en Nieuw <\/em>(New Year’s Eve).\u00a0Het is net een oorlog<\/em>! (It’s just like a war!)<\/p>\n

So what can we do about it?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Image by Adam Birkett at Unsplash.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Eye and other injuries have been a problem for years.\u00a0There’s been a debate about banning\u00a0vuurwerk\u00a0<\/em>completely, or just have public shows. We’ve written about that a while ago.<\/a> More cities are implementing such measures, but overall, the Dutch like their vuurwerk<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are ways to reconcile these things, perhaps… The Dutch government sure seems to think so when they came up with the\u00a0knalplanga<\/em>. The… Wha…<\/p>\n

Knalplanga!<\/em><\/strong><\/h1>\n