Big Jump in Fireworks Incidents This Year

Incidents involving illegal fireworks jumped this year, and so has the explosive power of the products, safety officials say.

South San Francisco police responded to 65 complaints of illegal fireworks on July 4 (67 including calls in which explosives were not the primary complaint), nearly half of the total number of police calls that day.

This represents a marked increase since 2010, when police responded to 39 calls, Chief Mike Massoni said in an email message.

Investigators have linked the use of illegal fireworks to a grassfire that quickly spread, destroying more than 45 vehicles in a Hertz Rent-A-Car overflow lot. Damages are expected to top $1 million.

“We had multiple reports of people using a lot of large booms — M-80s — and a significant increase in aerial discharges,” Fire Chief Philip White said. “Over the years, the amount of fire-related damages has gone down, but this year we had a major fire.”

The sheer volume of illegal products and their ready accessibility has overwhelmed some of law enforcement’s best efforts to rein in their use, according to the California State Department of Forestry and Fire.

If once, loners peddled illegal fireworks out of the trunks of their cars, today, massive, out-of-state operations ship huge quantities of aerial displays and explosives directly into the state, often ordered over the Internet.

The explosive power rivals or surpasses that of most public pyrotechnic displays, CalFire spokesman Dan Berlant said.

Exact numbers will not be available until the end of July, but each year the department confiscates 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of illegal firecrackers, he said.

More often than not, public safety officials don’t get the chance: in 39 South San Francisco cases, the perpetrators had fled by the time officers arrived.

“By the time we get there, there is no one there to hold accountable,” White said. “Our strategy will change next year.”

White declined to describe the public safety plan for July 4, 2012, but he said public safety officials have drafted a wholly different approach for locating and apprehending amateur pyrotechnicians.

A spate of other cities in the state and the nation also reported a spike in fireworks calls.

Out of 41 reports of fires on July 4, Portland, OR, Fire Department spokesman Paul Corah says 20 of them were directly attributable to illegal fireworks, an increase over the previous year.