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'There was no hand at all'
By adamg on Mon, 07/06/2015 - 9:24am
The Herald interviews a witness to yesterday's fireworks explosion in Dorchester that injured two boys.
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Comments
Good Lord
I'm still young enough to remember the teenage boy urge to light things on fire and blow things up. But this story is terrible, and every time I heard an M80 or other explosive going off around the neighborhood this weekend i kept waiting to hear the wail of sirens.
teenage urge?
My neighbors in Cambridge are in their 20s and they should that shit was hilarious.
Cambridge PD ignored multiple calls from my neighbors - some of the fireworks were huge, and they were at it from 9pm until after midnight, ever 30-40 minutes.
teenage urge?
My buddies and I gave up our "let's blow up things with M80s" phase by about the age of 11.
can I ask a question
While this is horrible.. I have to ask.. does Boston Police actually enforce the fireworks law? Meaning if someone calls, do they actually show up?
In Chelsealand they don't. I called Saturday night after hours of fireworks being shot off on my street. No one hurt like this boy was, but even still. In the middle of the street! But CPD didn't come and the fireworks kept shooting off.
Grown real tired of it. Why have a law when it's not 100A% enforced.
I even took some pictures of the mess on my street. CPD was out there this morning for a suspected shooting my street, and even commented on the mess. Nice if they would have come when I called.
Pics can be see here and here of the mess.
Very difficult to do
The reason it is impossible to enforce is because the fireworks dealers don't give a damn about who they sell to. This means that we get an overwhelming amount of fireworks coming in, and thus it has to be triaged against other needs (drunk fights at parties, etc.).
There are similar problems in other states where a "sales" state shares a border with a "non sales" state and a metro area of considerable size. Meaning: this plays out across the country wherever a more rural state sells buttloads of fireworks to a nearby city in another state that bans them.
About the only way to reign it in at this point would be a federal law requiring sellers to sell only to adults with a valid in-state ID, and keep records of sales. That would not totally solve the problem but it would restrict the flow.
I once retired a ratty swim towel when providing first aid for a kid who blew off half his hand with an M-80, so this accident is rather vividly horrifying to me.
yup
this is the explanation I was told by CPD a few years ago when I called. I still call anyways, more because of a fire starts, at least a call was logged about fireworks nearby.
I think more of the issue is just enforcement. There were at least 10 different areas I could tell (from my back deck) that were shooting off fireworks. CPD could dedicate several patrol cars to just this issue alone.. but it's hard to catch and enforce.
I guess my big issue was that it was happening right in the center of my street and nada was done about it. Behind people's homes okay.. but right in public view (and less than a 1/4 mile from the police hq itself).
The sellers really don't care.
About a month back Phanton Fireworks sent me a sales flyer. Sending a MA resident a flyer is, to me, just inviting MA residents to break the law. They even advertise their "close to Boston" location on their website:
http://www.fireworks.com/locations/phantom-seabrook-boston-ma/
For the record: the sales flyer they sent me went straight to the recycle bin.
In the West Coast there are also reservation issues.
Native American reservations have the same jurisdiction autonomy as a state as recognized by the Fed.
So in Washington, when I lived there, you'd get your cheap cigs and pyrotechnics at reservations like this one.
http://snofireworkssupply.com/
I know
I was in Spokane when I saw that kid blow his hand off. They were not legal in Washington at the time.
We used to buy fireworks on the reservations and then head over to the "detonation area". They would have a field set up with sprinklers to wet it down and firefighters standing by. This is no small issue given how tinder dry the West is right now.
But what if a MA resident
But what if a MA resident vacationing in NH wants to legally buy fireworks in NH to legally use at their vacation residence?
Hmmm
What if they want to blow up the straw man they erected?
There is a festival for that
http://tickets.burningman.org/
You can do that.
Most towns in New Hampshire require a permit by the towns fire department though in order to use them.
Possessing them in MA is illegal, not in New Hampshire though.
Don't think so
While cycling home in the afternoon I saw kids set off fireworks (granted none were M80's) on the basketball court adjacent to the SW Corridor behind the BPD HQ all last week.
Cops hung out in the parking lot behind HQ, never really seemed to care.
In a previous year, the BPD
In a previous year, the BPD showed up after the fact to a report of fireworks outside my house. I didn't report it, didn't see the point what with hearing so many fireworks in the neighborhood. But they did come.
The cop asked people who had witnessed the fireworks if they had seen anything. They said no. He even touched the residue and smelled it. But then he drove away. What else was there to be done? The guy who set it off wasn't there. And how would he know who set it off any way?
BTW, I don't think I've ever heard as many illegal fireworks as I have this year thus far. I've seen the Phantom ad too, and can't remember seeing it previous years. I can't help but think the advertising worked, unfortunately for these kids.
Fireworks in Dorchester
I called last year about extremely loud fireworks that were actually shaking my house. BPD came and went, and then the fireworks resumed.
This year the same crowd was doing the same thing, but I didn't bother calling the BPD. Why bother? Very young kids with sparklers, adults with beers, setting off what sounded like howitzers. Right in the middle of a crowded street, with parked cars on both sides, and wood houses on both sides of the street. Large (empty?) cartons in their yard today,marked "fireworks". The street is still littered with the fireworks remains.
The fireworks are all over the place in my neighborhood. Day and night, and until 2 or 3 in the AM on Friday and Saturday night.
The biggest surprise is that there aren't more fires and injuries.
YEP
This is why I am hesitant to call at all. Why bother? Nothing gets done anyways. And what gets me is that Chelsea in particular has had two terrible fires in the last century, both of which destroyed a major part of the city. You'd think they would beef up patrol and not allow this to happen.
Like your neighborhood, we had fireworks starting around 4pm and shooting off until 2am both Friday and Saturday nights. (or that was about the time I passed out for exhaustion)
I maybe got six hours of sleep all weekend between fireworks, loud music, and neighbor's dogs going nuts for the latter. The kicker: went to the beach yesterday to escape the loudness of my neighborhood.. and of course some large family came with a boom box and started to blare their crappy music (that I escaped to the beach to get away from). Let's just say I lost it.
Yeah not a happy camper today. Tired and sunburnt.
PS - Next year, like my roommate, I will leave town. tired of the noise. I just didn't this year because I'm four days away from vacation on the cape for 2 weeks.
Fireworks late at night
People who set off fireworks in neighborhoods only seem to want to do it late at night. In my East Boston neighborhood there is a group of offenders who start about 9 PM and go until 3:30 AM. Also in my experience, the main offenders of fireworks in neighborhoods seem always to be in their 30s and 40s rather than younger.
Every cop in a ten mile
Every cop in a ten mile radius was busy "policing" the Esplanade by standing around gazing into the abyss.
Don't let the facts get in the way of a rant, eh?
The Esplanade cops were mostly on overtime. BPD staffs the districts with regular compliments.
Who was paying?
If the City is paying for the overtime, the original point is valid. Instead of putting on security theater at the Esplanade, the City could have paid for the additional units to respond to calls in the neighborhoods.
I wish
Then property taxes could go down if all we had to do was tell them they shined their shoes really nice for us.
But nooooo, they have to have regular complements of officers instead.
People in my neighborhood
People in my neighborhood were lighting off multiple rounds of fireworks at 2AM two sundays ago. It was obvious who was doing it but the BPD officer who showed up said he couldn't do anything unless he saw people in the act of lighting the fireworks. The assholes drove off in their SUV(of course) and left garbage on the sidewalk(of course) with no punishment.
Horrible story
Poor kid. I'd love to see more effort to reduce illegal fireworks. I guess that makes me a Nanny-State Liberal. I can live with that. Fireworks in densely-populated, residential neighborhoods, with lots of little kids running around? Bad, bad, bad.
The college students on
The college students on Reddit were saying the fireworks law was "draconian" and needs to be put to a vote and were generally agast at discovering this 40something year old ban for the first time in their 4 year vacation in Boston. Guess they found another vital issue to protest for other than legalizing all drugs and lowering the drinking age.
What are they doing here anyway?
It's the Fourth of July. School let out six weeks ago. Go vomit on tourists in Hyannis.
To be fair, the reddit
To be fair, the reddit comments were on an article about fireworks being seized in Barnstable... so the driver was on the cape.
http://www.wcvb.com/news/7000-in-illegal-fireworks-seized-by-massachuset...
New Hampshire's good-neighbor policy
New Hampshire borders exactly zero states that allow private fireworks. NH didn't used to allow them either. In the same spirit that led them to build giant state liquor stores on major highways near our border, they legalized the sale of all kinds of fireworks. Possession of many of the explosives is still prohibited, so out-of-staters are encouraged to get them out of NH quickly.
This is more than a minor public-safety issue:
The Second Amendment doesn't even mention explosives, so why are these extremely dangerous devices allowed? Can the governors of MA, VT, ME, and Québec try to persuade their NH counterpart to alter the state's greed-fueled policy?
Here is a partial list of this year's fireworks death and injury toll.
Not true
Maine legalized them in 2012.
And look what that got them...
This year, a guy put a mortar tube on his head like a hat and died when the tube exploded instead of firing off correctly.
I stand corrected
And saddened.
NH social pathology.
It's more than just dumb vice rackets. They actively cultivate large mendacious stinker corporations from Comcast to Liberty Mutual to make it a regional headquarters for dodging taxes and wages.
Their system is based on the "beggar thy neighbor" approach when possible. Fortunately, their intrinsic value as a location is so low that these gimmicks are of limited use. It's not like big pharma is falling over itself to relocate there due to the state of art research and education options.
Nor is it that popular with infotech for similar reasons.