There's been lots of talk here about the "River of Lightning" being planned for Sunday's close of the Summer Games.
On Thursday, organizers explained it. And it's going to be big.
It's planned to go something like this:
At 8 p.m. the closing ceremonies begin at Olympic Stadium at Homebush Bay, which is a few miles up the Parramatta River from the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the nearby Sydney Opera House.
About 9 p.m. the stadium's cauldron will be extinguished, after which an F-111 jet fighter will do a "dump and burn" over the stadium — dumping its fuel and lighting it with its afterburners to create a trail of flame 1,000 feet long.
That begins the start of the on-field celebration by athletes, expected to last an hour.
About 10 p.m., if all goes as scheduled, the closing ceremonies at the stadium will end with a fireworks display that will include lightning shells, fireworks created to look like lightning.
Those shells will touch off a series of 24 lightning-shell display sites, each about 500 meters apart, that will act like a fuse, taking the lightning display down the river to the Sydney Harbor Bridge, where there will be another dump and burn by an F-111.
And then the real fireworks begin.
Five fireworks companies from around the world — including Alonzo Fireworks Display Inc. of Mechanicville, N.Y. — will each have three minutes to show off their best stuff.
At the end of the fireworks extravaganza, the Sydney Harbor Bridge will explode with fireworks in five colors, symbolic of the Olympic rings, and the large set of Olympic rings on the bridge will be set on fire.
The cost of everything that will go up in smoke? Organizers said Thursday they aren't telling.