I posted this in the 4th of July thread already, but…
It’s like a war zone up here on the 4th. Fireworks start going off around 0900 and reach a crescendo at midnight – with stragglers happening for about another hour or so. The whole shore is lit up with people playing with fireworks from sparklers and smoke bombs to very impressive aerial shells. Aerial shells are forbidden back in L.A. (actually, I think ‘safe & sane’ fireworks are also forbidden nowadays) so I had to buy myself a mortar with a dozen shells. We headed walked down the little hill to the beach to join the ‘crowd’. (‘Crowd’ because there were only about 1/3 the people who usually show up. Must be the poor economy. There were still thousands there though.) My friend doesn’t like lighting fireworks, so she just unwrapped the fuses for me and I lit them off. We enjoyed our toy, and the displays put up by the multitude. Anyway…
The people next to us had a campfire. They decided to burn their empty fireworks boxes. Only they weren’t empty. There were at least three live ones in there. Oops. You shoulda seen 'em run!
Important safety tip: If you’re going to burn your boxes, make sure they’re empty.
Oddly enough, I just didn’t feel like lighting off fireworks this year. So we didn’t. We stayed inside and cuddled while listening to some broadcast concert or other (my mind wasn’t really on the music).
That said, given my oldest sister is a doctor I expect to be hearing Medical Stories next time I talk to her, especially as she was working on the 4th.
I know a guy who nearly lost his car to some neighborhood fireworks. Left a window open on the 4th one year; an errant bottle rocket entered and set fire to the seats.
As a 5th grader many moons ago, I was an old hand at fireworks. Responsible, respectful; it’s only the fools that get hurt, right?
July 4th BBQ at home, all the dads standing around drinking illicit Coors that someone had brought back from west of the Mississippi…this was 1972…the boys all playing with fireworks.
I set a big bottle rocket in it’s bottle leaned up against a log. Not a tiny “regular” sized BR, we were shooting these big cigar-sized babies. Just like a dozen times before, I lit and ran. Easily a hundred feet away we watched as the rocket and bottle fell over, pointed at us. Before my brain could even send a message and start some synapses firing - whoosh! The rocket hit me square in my forehead, bounced back in mid-air about 2 feet still burning, and then shot over my shoulder into the woods. Everyone was laughing their ass off but my dad. He just stood there with his beer and said “I would never believe anyone who told me that happened if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”
Luckily we weren’t shooting rockets with those little plasic pointy nosecones, or I’m pretty sure I would have been dead that day. As it was, I ended up with a big round bruise for a few days.
I feel bad admitting this but for those of us that weren’t affected by the fire, it was sort of fun to watch. A week of hearing fire trucks and guessing what city they’d be from (some were from over an hour away), thinking it was out only to see more flames a day later, having the streets fill with smoke when the wind would shift.
No one had any idea what started it for quite a while, until they realized they had a security camera on the area. It looked like a missile hit the building*. Then there was all the drama regarding why they called in stations from all over SE Wisconsin but never the city of Milwaukee or the airport.**
**In SE Wisconsin we have a system where when a city needs help they’ll call other departments and the others can call on them (this goes for police and fire). We requested lots of help from all over the area but never the City Of Milwaukee. They have enough man power that they tend not to call on the suburbs, so sometimes the suburbs don’t call on them. Same thing goes for the airport. The problem with the airport is that most people felt the airport could have put it out very very quickly. The fire was mostly contained in a 4 foot high crawl space above the plant which is why it was soooo hard to get to. The airport has fire fighting rigs that are designed to punch right through the side of a fuselage and fill it with foam. In theory they should have been able to use this to punch into the side of the crawlspace and get the fire under control very quickly.
Not to be a party pooper, since your sequential titles bit was funny, but I was wondering if anyone knows of a study that says how many of these accidents are because the illegal fireworks don’t meet some kind of minimum safety requirement (fuse length and amount of gunp powder, etc) and how much is user error. I personally am for legalizing fireworks. I don’t buy them, but I figure the state might as well make money off the people that do. They’re going to smuggle them in anyway. If you police them, then can’t we impose some kind of standard, like no toys from China with lead paint. As is, imperfect and possibly more dangerous than normal fireworks are getting through because no one inspects them. The people who get hurt from user error are pretty much the ones that are going to get hurt regardless of what they’re doing. They’re the ones the warning labels “Do not put pets in microwave oven” are for. By and large, the newspaper articles I read of people getting seriously injured are the people playing with illegal fireworks. I’m also assuming that if we legalize fireworks, the cost would go down, since they don’t have to be smugled in. So people would be less likely to try and make every one go off if the spent 20 bucks per firework as oppose to a hundred (sorry no idea how much they go for).
I know there must be another side to this, since they’re still illegal, so what is it?
I’m guessing that virtually all fireworks are legal somewhere. I’ve never seen ANY that appear to be put together in someone’s garage. I have no idea what the safety standards might be, but the illegal part is bringing them into areas where they are illegal, not making them by ‘inderground’ substandard processes.
Why are they illegal in some areas and not in others? Consult your local government. I CAN say with a pretty high degree of confidence that if you try firing a bottle rocket from your ass, you’re likely to get burned no matter how well made the rocket is.
Actually, where I live fireworks are legal. It varies by jurisdiction.
I don’t think legalizing them would drive the price down much - a lot of them are pretty damn cheap, even where illegal and smuggled (that’s comparing prices here vs. Chicago - admittedly my research isn’t up to rigorous scientific standards).
The biggest problem isn’t really substandard crap (though there is some out there) but people doing dumb things and unsafe things with them. Add in alcohol and/or drugs for greater stupidity. Fireworks are really small explosives that burn very hot, so doing stupid stuff with them can hurt you extremely badly.
Actually, much to the doomsayers surprise, every year since fireworks were legalized here the accident rate has gone down, not up, even though more people are using them every year. Personally, I think this is because
kids aren’t sneaking around in back alleys so much doing it on the sly so they don’t get caught
mom and dad are supervising, so assuming mom and dad are competent human beings this is probably a good thing.
adults aren’t sneaking around doing this on the sly, either, in fact, in some neighborhoods families are grouping together for mutual shows were it is possible some positive peer pressure occurs in regards to safety.
4)instead of going OMIGOD YOU’RE GONNA DIE! the local media circulate actual safety rules every 4th of July which probably helps even the incompetent humans not hurt themselves.
Yeah, they’re definitely “illegal” because of local/city/state laws and ordinances, not because they’re banned from the U.S. I live in Missouri, which does not have any kind of state fireworks ban, though I live in the city of St. Louis, where fireworks are illegal (not that you can tell on the 4th, with flares going up in every street and alley across the city and county). I can drive 15 minutes to a stand on the interstate in another county where I can buy mortars, M-80s, giant tubes of various exploding shells, fountains, 300-ft. flower shells, etc. These are factory-made fireworks, usually imported quite legally from China or Malaysia or someplace.
We moved to a new neighbourhood last month. Nice house, the neighbours are our age, there’s a playground right in our backyard . . . all that good stuff. We just didn’t know that they have a local firework display every year, which is set off from the playground. Scared the crap out of us. To make it even better we were watching *Schindler’s List * and were at a very dramatic part. It was like we had surround sound!
I miss the days when fireworks were legal, and we often go stay with family in another city where we can buy them and have some fun. But looking at those videos of amazing stupidity, it’s not surprising they’re illegal so many places. I mean, the whole ‘firework as penis’ thing is obvious, but who actually sticks a lighted explosive on their junk?? Talk about a Darwin Award…
