Let’s see, my most horrific 4th of July memory was when a kid I knew in Jr High was messing around with an M-80. He was “fake” lighting the fuse by moving the lighter flame right next to it then yanking it away.
Unfortunately he finally accidentally lit it and since we were in his garage, he panicked and instead of throwing it, he held it down against the floor to avoid damaging nearby things (and us). As you can imagine….
The M80 blew off this thumb and two other fingers.
the current very legal bombs cause horrendous injuries when held in the hand.
I am a BATF licensed pyrotechnician, and a volunteer firefighter.
We spent hours setting up our community display yesterday. Went smoothly and without a hitch.
In the meantime, a City Councilman, just one block away, had a mortal shell go off in his yard about head height, by chance, no one was injured. About 30 minutes after I got home from our show, I got called out for a brush fire threatening homes. Yeah, it was caused by fireworks. Yeah, people were upset because there weren’t enough fire trucks to park one in every yard, and fight the fire.
Oh, we wired up a 15 year old and sent him around to the various fireworks stands. One of the stands, with very little prompting, explained to him how to modify various legal fireworks to make them even more dangerous. Fire Chief yanked their permit and kicked them out of town.
In our state under the guise of personal freedom not only have mandatory motorcycle helmet laws been repealed, so has the fireworks law. Given that we haven’t had any rain for almost a month, these are causing a lot of fires including burning a church down. Cities are coming up with their own bans saying they cannot be lit off except for the day before or on a major holiday. One major city’s mayor if furious at the state because his city’s firefighters are busy putting out fires without the benefit of getting the tax money from the fireworks sales that the state is.
YIKES. I saw the photo of the display in, I think it was San Diego, where all of ‘em went off at once? These things are EXPLOSIVES, guess folks don’t really comprehend that.
Jesus Christ Don, what people will do!
saw a kid lose an eye and the eyesight in the other when he looked down into the bottle that he had made the explosive device in to see why it hadn’t gone off…