I will git. It’s not one night, though. It starts in May and goes through the end of July, with the 4th being the worst.
That’s the thing, a lot of times it’s not actually illegal fireworks that are making the big, MOAB-sounding “whoomps” people complain most about. Those would be the people with welding rigs filling balloons and sometimes garbage bags full of oxy-acetylene and igniting them. Usually not too dangerous, other than to your hearing and psyche, but sometimes things don’t go as planned, and static or a stray spark can ignite them before everybody is at a safe distance.
Amateur fireworks are 100% illegal here in Illinois.The rumble is pretty much continuous for several hours after night falls July 4th. I’ve listened to the Chicago Police radio and they gang-dispatch the fireworks calls. This means the dispatcher reads off a dozen or more addresses for fireworks complaints. A sergeant or higher then tells dispatch to clear those calls. This happens a couple times an hour. They usually don’t even drive by. Sometimes, a squadcar comes across a group lighting off fireworks. The crowd is dispersed and that’s it. I’ve never heard of anyone getting ticketed or arrested for this. Even the calls of shots fired get a far slower response than usual.
It is amazing anyone survived that explosion. It blew the roof apart like it was a convertible.
When I was a teenager, an older coworker told me about garbage bags of acetylene. He said they’d pull them high in a tree and trail toilet paper down to the ground. Lighting this ‘fuse’ gave them enough time to run for safety. It really got my attention. Luckily, I’ve since outgrown my pyro huh-huh-fire interests but I’ve always been sort of curious to give this a try. I won’t because it scares the crap out of me.
I know a Vietnam veteran who could not watch the fireworks with his grandchildren. It was both a fact of life and sad at the same time.
I must agree that the increase in obnoxious noise around the holiday needs to be curtailed. I don’t know how it could be done.
The “good” fireworks are illegal in Virginia. I lived in the NOVA area for many years and nothing that really explodes is legal to sell, buy or set off there. Lived on base at Belvoir too, as a lad. Dad’s retired Army Engineer officer.
My jerk neighbors across the street love to set off fireworks from their driveway and point them at my house. They are fond of bottle rockets and Roman candles, things that rain embers on my roof. July is a very dry time of year here.
If they shot the fireworks from their back yard and pointed them the other way, the fireworks would explode harmlessly above the lake.
It’s hard not to suspect that they’re intentionally trying to set my house on fire.
Indeed. Private amateur-level fireworks were legalized here a decade ago. What have people done? Sought out the still-illegal high-explosive stuff. It’s like it was never about the fireworks per se but rather about getting away with doing what you should not.
A long time ago I had a job doing computer support for a county 911 agency. One year I had to be onsite the night of July 4th to provide instant support in case the computers went down. Instead of sitting at my desk websurfing, I decided to go “jack in” (put on a headset and plug into a dispatcher’s console) with one of the police dispatchers. It was enlightening. Early in the night they tried responding to the noise complaints, but after about an hour they had a backlog of them. After about three hours they just gave up even entering them into the computer because they were coming in every couple minutes from all over the city. Personal fireworks were illegal there, so they wanted to enforce the law, but they couldn’t. They were a nuisance that diverted the cops from more serious problems and crimes, so they stopped even trying to respond to the noise complaints.
Here in Orange County there are only a handful of cities that allow the sale and use of “safe and sane” fireworks. Basically if it leaves the ground or makes a big bang it is illegal, even metal sparklers are banned.
Huntington Beach is not usually one of those cities; however, when we lived there is was like WW3 on the 4th. The streets would be filled with smoke for hours and my dogs would be hiding in the bathtub by 8 p.m. Where we live now is better, no silent, but much better.
I am under the assumption that they can be restricted by the state, but county and city governments can add restrictions of their own. For example, in the San Francisco area, the last time I checked, fireworks (including innocuous things like sparklers) were illegal throughout Marin County (I think this started because of the mid-1970s drought; back then, Marin depended entirely on its reservoirs for water), while in Sonoma county, Petaluma and Rohnert Park may still allow them, but Santa Rosa does not.
Besides - somehow, I doubt that the kind that make noises loud enough to take notice are legal anywhere except by licensed pyrotechnicians.
my neighbors has family in the fireworks business and he gets a lot of fireworks that’s left over from Chinese new years /tet ect and last year he had some big ones and he got caught … all the firetruck guys did was give him a warning they took a few he had out and we stood there looking like wed been caught by mom in the cookie jar …
What did the out of town relatives that were there do ? bring out the biggest and loudest ones they still had linked them up in a row to a single fuse yelled a couple of anarchist slogans in Spanish lit them up on the cross street and ran back home as they blew up… it was loud and pretty tho
but any city with a Asian population is going to have illegal fireworks …you should see when little Saigon gets raided for them once or twice a year
Correct, local jurisdictions can make fireworks laws more restrictive than the state law, but not less.
27 states allow the sale of all or most types of consumer fireworks. That category includes mortars - AKA artillery shell, airburst - that explode quite loudly. The noise is definitely noticeable.
Part of living in a society is respecting the rights of those around you, including their right not to be disturbed by explosions in the middle of the night, and not having their house burned down because your toys got out of control in a drought-ridden desert.
If someone wants to do that shit, they can go out in the boonies somewhere where they’re not bothering or endangering anyone else.
There’s no such thing as the “freedom” to be a sociopath.
It just started up early this morning, after midnight.
Sigh…It’s going to be a long season. Three more months of this.
Meh. It ain’t a fireworks show if you can’t feel it in your chest.
Are there any states out there that have restrictions on the bigger fireworks but not an outright ban? I wonder if that would be better.
In Illinois, anything bigger than a snake or sparkler is banned, so everyone drives to Missouri or Indiana where they can get anything, so they come back with a Komodo 3000. I feel like if they made it so you could get all the bottle rockets and airplanes and roman candles you wanted, people would be less likely to make the drive just to get the big stuff.
I am assuming that the main reason things like bottle rockets are banned in most places is not because of the injury factor, but the chance that they will cause a fire. It wouldn’t seem to make sense from the government’s point of view to put the line too far above the “safe and sane” level.
The map with that article has Texas the wrong color. Should be striped blue & orange, given that many (all?) of the large cities prohibit fireworks within city limits.
Here in South Carolina, it is the small stuff that is outlawed. Cherry bombs, M-80s, and “rockets less than 1/2 inch in diameter” are illegal–pretty much anything else goes.