Houston Fire Department destroys $128,000 in fireworks for vendors

HOUSTON — It took two sessions and five hours, but the Houston Fire Department managed to dispose of $128,000 in fireworks for a local fireworks stand.

And how did they dispose of them? Probably the same way you would have.

“The safest and most controlled way, what was recommended by the manufacturer and the shipper, was just to light them off,” said Christian Hartley, Houston Fire Department spokesman.

With things like dynamite, departments will often set the explosives on fire in a controlled way that doesn’t lead to a major explosion, he said. But that usually involves burning gasoline and motor oil and to do that, Hartley said and that means you need permits from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The paperwork is less complicated when you’re just going to light the fireworks, he said.

“They still had to go through a lot of permits to be able to destroy those, but it’s not nearly as involved,” Hartley said.

And it wasn’t as if the firefighters just put on a free show. In fact, the rules clearly stated that that wasn’t allowed. The unsalable fireworks could not in anyway be used for a fireworks display. Which is why the department took some relatively unorthodox steps to make sure that those fireworks didn’t entertain any passersby who might have wanted to stop and watch near the site on the Parks Highway where the disposal operation was staged.

“We probably had to ask about 10 or 12 people to keep moving,” Hartley said. Nearly all of them had parked along the highway. “We had to go up to the vehicles and ask them to leave.”

There was also safety to think about.

“Houston Fire Department would not permit the destruction to continue if a public safety hazard was created in the process,” Hartley wrote in a press release.

He said that rubbernecking is also why the operation took two days. After three and a half hours on Dec. 2, there were just too many people who wanted to watch. The department began again on Sunday for another hour and a half of explosions.

He said that at some point that first day someone called a local radio station to say that Gorilla Fireworks was on fire. Hartley said the department very quickly called the station to quash that rumor. But he could understand why people might think that.

The disposal operation was actually across the highway and on a different property but it was close enough that people could see the fireworks going off and thought that the stand was on fire, he said.

As for why these fireworks needed to be destroyed, Hartley said that the vendor that supplied them had selected a new supplier. After the fireworks stand bought the fireworks and that supplier lost its certification with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So the fireworks, under federal and local law, could no longer be sold.

Hartley said the department supplied an engine, a tanker and 12 firefighters to conduct and monitor the operation.

He said the fireworks stand didn’t lose out – the vendor had to send replacements.

Houston is probably one of the few communities in the state that has to dispose of fireworks on a regular basis, he said. Hartley said that this particular operation was very unusual. Over the course of a typical year, all of the fireworks stands in Houston will probably have to give up five to 20 fireworks.

He said that, from Houston’s perspective, fireworks tend to get a bad rap. Forest fires due to fireworks are rare, while burn barrels, for instance, cause a quarter of wildfires in Alaska. In Houston those numbers are even smaller.

“In the last three years we responded to one fire that was determined to be a result of fireworks and we’ve had no injuries.