Well, you've got your cookouts and parades and flags and early-morning pancake breakfasts and patriotic readings and marching bands and mayors' speeches, but you and I both know what most distinguishes the Fourth of July from any other holiday:Fireworks
There's something about things that go BOOM that attracts people -- even to the point of making normally law-abiding citizens join the ranks of the criminal element. Utah peace officers have stepped up their patrols of the state border this year to keep people from bringing firecrackers and cher- ry bombs in from Idaho and Wyoming.
Utah allows only Class C fireworks, primarily the fountain-type that you set on the driveway and watch as they fire sparks, or the sparklers you write your name in the air with.
But that's only the warmup to the big show.
See if this sounds familiar: Aunt Mae and Uncle Walter and cousin Bertie arrive sometime in the afternoon and the family assembles in the back yard to stuff itself with barbecued chicken and potato salad loaded onto flimsy paper plates.
Then, as it starts to get dark, one and all pile into the station wagon and drive to the park to watch the fireworks show.
Your family isn't the only one, of course. Cowboys, executives, waitresses, computer programmers -- all converge and stop living their individual lives for an hour or two, united in a common spectacle of patriotic wonder.
Making fire
Various companies in Utah buy fireworks to resell to the public and municipalities. But only one Utah company, Cache Valley-based Fireworks West Internationale, actually makes fireworks.
In fact, Fireworks West is the largest fireworks manufacturer west of the Mississippi.
Dean Birch bought the company in 1990 from Logan resident Ralph Degn.
Degn founded it in 1972. He flunked out of medical school and quit an MBA program before finally succumbing to his lifelong passion of blowing up the back yard with increasingly complex homemade bombs.
Back in those early days, a number of mom-and-pop fireworks manufacturers were around. But over the years, regulations proliferated, some of them onerous, and several companies went out of business.
Fireworks West employees must keep records on every shell for five years -- when it was manufactured, how long it was stored, where it was fired off. Each building at the factory has a metal rod at the entrance that employees touch before entering to ground themselves of static electricity, and "when a lightning storm comes, we're outta here," said safety and compliance director Chris Carlson.
The carefree days of Roman candle fights between employees are gone. "They'd be fired now," Carlson said.
One Fireworks West employee lost his eye and another employee some fingers while working with stars, the small chunks of gunpowder that become the points of light in a firework. But most infamously for Fireworks West, in 1981 a bunch of stars that were drying from the manufacturing process spontaneously combusted, causing an explosion whose concussion was heard and/or felt throughout Cache Valley and which destroyed a building on the site.
"That was a very tough time," Degn said. "A very tough time."
No one was around, luckily, so no one was injured, but the blast generated a lot of publicity -- the bad kind -- and impelled the factory to move to a remote area of Cache Valley next to sewage treatment ponds, away from populated areas.
Curiously, a firing range is also located nearby. On one occasion someone was (illegally) firing an elephant gun and the shot was whizzing over the heads of Fireworks West workers -- and over the tons of fireworks stored there.
Basically, all the businesses no one wants to be around are stuck close to each other.
"I expect the dump to be here next," Carlson said.
Big Tom Bongo
Every year Fireworks West makes about 300,000 fireworks to sell all over the world. The fireworks range in diameter from 3 inches to 16 inches.
A 16-inch shell is, in case you're wondering, huge. A strong man staggers when holding it. When it goes off, it has a whopping 1,500-foot spread. It takes 2 1/2 pounds of black powder to get it into the air.
Fireworks West employees even have a name for any 16-inch shell: "Big Tom Bongo."
Not many 16-inch shells get shot off, but when they do, they're noticed. When Fireworks West shot one off last year in Brigham City, the lift blast set off several car alarms in the parking lot. The burst set off most of the rest.
It requires thousands of dollars to put on fireworks shows, but a lot of Utah cities obviously believe it's worth it -- among them West Valley City, Salt Lake City, Layton, Riverton, Pleasant View, Bountiful, Kaysville and Provo. The smaller shows cost only a few thousand, but big ones, like Logan, which uses about 1,000 shells, cost $25,000 or more.
Trained pyrotechnicians (yes, they're really called that) have to set off the larger shows. Local firefighters often set off the smaller ones.
"They like that," said Fireworks West engineer Tim Nielsen. "They really look forward to it."
Back in the old days, and even now in the smaller shows, setting off fireworks was a simple endeavor: Bury a bunch of mortar pipes in the ground for stabilization, drop the shells down in them with the fuses trailing out the top, light them off with a lighter or something, and watch them go.
Clean out the mortar pipe, drop another shell in there, do it again.
It's a simple procedure, but you have to be careful. In Brigham City one year, Carlson set off an 8-inch shell standing too close to the mortar and the concussion blew her back 4 feet.
Electronic ignition is the thing nowadays. Revised federal regulations require all shells larger than 8 inches to be shot off electronically, and the larger shows have the whole thing choreographed anyway, requiring 24-volt ignition from a large control board.
The Logan show, which takes place in Utah State University's football stadium, is choreographed to amplified music literally down to the second. The script is several pages long, specifying the exact time to set off each shell and the type of shell to set off -- sunflower, salute, whirlwind, tiger tail, thunder and rainbow, any one of a whole array of different types of shells.
Fireworks can contain such novelties as whistles and screamers and reports, but stars are the standard. They are given different colors by adding different chemicals to the basic black powder ingredient: copper oxide for blue, stron tium nitrate for red, sodium oxilate for yellow.
Timing is everything
As with so many other fireworks shows, the Logan show features Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to be an American." The song's climax comes near the end when Greenwood sings "and I'll gladly staaand UP! (cymbal crash) next to you, and defend her still today. . . . "
Al Burns, the Fireworks West man responsible for choreographing the shows, usually plans for a big shell -- an 8-inch or 12-inch, say -- to burst right at the cymbal crash.
The timing is tricky -- it takes three to five seconds after launching the shell for it to reach the apex of its flight and burst. As with other shells, it has to be launched the exact amount of time before the cymbal crash.
Other things can go wrong. Some shells are duds or explode at the wrong time -- on the way up or the way down -- or explode at the right time but not the right way, bursting in only one direction (a "dumper"). Even dumpers, however, often elicit oohs and aahs, and some manufacturers even design some shells to break that way.
Fireworks manufacturers are busy right now. In addition to Independence Day (and, in Utah, Pioneer Day), people are gearing up for the literal celebration of the century, when the calendar turns to Jan. 1, 2000.
"We're tired," Carlson said. "That's a good sign."
But if you're thinking of hoarding up your sparklers and squibs to set off on your birthday or something, think again. Utah allows fireworks only during the three days before and after Independence Day, Pioneer Day, New Year's Day and the Chinese New Year.
That's only appropriate, seeing as the things were invented in China, after all.