It’s that time of year, when people young and old celebrate our Independence by blowing off a hand or blasting away an eye or burning down a house. Last year I tried to keep track of some of them in this thread. Let’s see how we can do in 2018. The week of firecracker hijinks is just beginning. Happy fourth!
Wisconsin
My family has a fireworks tradition. We’ll go to my sister’s small ranch out in the country, where it’s legal to set them off, and have a big BBQ. Then we’ll go shopping and drop a couple thousand(this year it was closer to 4k) on fireworks at a local stand where they know us and throw in freebies. We’ll go back to the ranch and prep everything. We hose down a section of pasture way away from the house and upwind from the stock tank so that hopefully things will drop in the stock tank. We carefully unwrap everything, including taking the paper off the top of the cakes because we don’t want them to become flaming cinders as the shells burst through them, and screw all the mortars down to a big flatbed trailer and set up secondary launch platforms for big cakes and multi-shots for the finale. We’ll have people with water hoses both at the launch area and at a couple places in the pasture downwind of the launch area. We stage all our reload materials at least ten feet from any active flames and have reload crews to bring them to the launch sites after each round of shots is fired. We also have fire extinguishers and my older brother went to pyrotechnician’s school and acts as safety officer. We don’t do a commercial display(although he could) because it’s very expensive(yea, I know) and requires you to book the local fire department to come out and be on standby during it. Also the big 6 inch shells are just way overkill for a small ranch.
There’s usually about six of us on the launch area and a couple more on fire suppression duty. Most of the neighborhood turns out to watch our show and it usually runs about an hour each year. Over the years my sister’s neighbors have stopped doing their own shows and just begun throwing their budget at us(which is a good part of the reason it is so high) and they all just caravan over to my sisters place when it gets dark. There’s usually about 100 people sitting on her porch and driveway along the fence to the pasture watching us these days.
All that having been said. Doing your own fireworks is dangerous and even a well trained and experienced crew like the one my family sports can have problems. This year we got some bad fireworks and had no less than three of them blow out the side and catch fire instead of going up. We had a couple batches of mortars that looked like they had suffered water damage in storage and the cardboard shells had swollen a bit from the moisture. As a result they wouldn’t drop cleanly down into the mortar tubes and give a good launch when the primary charge(the one that makes it go UP) went off, so they didn’t go as high as they should to be fully burnt before falling back to the ground. We had to find tubes that were slightly larger or pull those from rotation, we did have some unexploded shells at the end of the night that we had to destroy. We had no less than four grass fires because it was windy and took the sparks to areas we hadn’t watered down. We’ve had the same two fire extinguishers for about five years now, never needed them. This year we used them both. We also had one of our water hoses separate on us so we lost water to the launch area at the end of the night. This was a bad year for us. Our worst in several years. Be safe out there people, it can go sideways fast.
Enjoy,
Steven
Great post Mtgman.
Last year there were about 8000 fire works related injuries in the United States between mid-June and mid-July. Lots of people have fun with fireworks, but alcohol, youth and carelessness added to the explosions can cause a heck of a lot of damage.
I can easily gauge how many kids live nearby after the 4th’s fireworks.
The neighborhood originally had older residents. I heard very few fireworks
This year has been the most active. Starting several weeks ago. It’s illegal in my city.but that doesn’t discourage many.
Doesn’t bother me. I can easily tune it out.
I find the older I get, the less I am interested in explosions of any kind.
Yes, I lost interest in fireworks in my twenties. They are expensive and there’s some danger. Most of us have encountered a quick fuse on a firecracker or bottle rocket.
That’s when you’re glad you were taught to hold the end of the firecracker. Usually about an 1/8 inch of contact with your finger. That saved me injury on several occasions.
I bought some for my girls and closely supervised. This was at the river and legal. They lost interest by high school.