I have been searching around for reviews of the Burlington, VT 4th of July celebration fireworks from the 3rd of July. So far I haven’t found any, so I thought I would post my thoughts here, in case anyone was interested, like, the city of Burlington or something.
My review can be summed up in one word: frustrating. You see, I don’t think the fireworks were bad. Probably. I couldn’t really tell. It was very hard to see them through the giant cloud of black smoke. I took several photographs of the fireworks from the beach where I was sitting with my mildly disappointed family. Generally what we saw looked like this:
We could tell that there was an explosion of some sort, and we could often tell what color that explosion was, but that was about it for us. This was our fireworks experience. “Look, a yellow one!” “I think that one may have been red!”
Now, I know that you are thinking. The city of Burlington cannot be blamed for a lack of wind on the day of the celebration. And this is true. I have seen plenty of fireworks shows before where the lack of wind to blow the smoke away creates an obscured view. But never this bad. And I have a theory about it. Prior to the event I read more than one news article talking about the new company that had been hired to do the show. They claimed that, while the show was going to be shorter than usual, they would be sending up more fireworks than ever. I have to admit that this sounded like a pretty cool idea, in theory. More bang for your buck! A denser, more compact fireworks show that would blow us all away and get the kids into bed a few minutes earlier seemed like a fabulous idea. But when you don’t leave any space between your rockets, you don’t leave any time for the wind, what little there was, to blow the smoke away. Even with slightly stronger gusts I don’t know if we would have been able to see the display. So we got this:
And if we were really lucky and they shot one up super high, we got this:
And every once in a while, when a small amount of smoke had cleared and a really large rocket exploded, we could see the top half of it, like this:
Although it could just have been where we were sitting. Judging from the long thick smoke line sloping upward into the sky it appeared that the smoke was slowly drifting to the left of us, but it may have also been slowly drifting imperceptibly toward us as well. You see, I searched on Youtube for a video of the 2013 Fireworks, and Youtube user Heavenly Ryan has uploaded a mostly sideways video of the whole thing, and all of the fireworks look clear and visible. So I guess I should have been sitting where Heavenly Ryan was sitting. Maybe it was my fault after all.
No! I refuse to take the blame for this! I sat and watched the fireworks last year on that same beach and could see them perfectly well. In fact, I have sat at similar beaches for many previous years and could always see everything. The only thing different this year, as far as I can tell, was the new company trying to show off and blow up too many things at once. And so, in conclusion, I demand that the completely free event that seemed fine for other people be retooled and tailored to my liking, specifically in regards to my demands and complaints laid out in the above post. Because if I ever get a full time job, it will be my taxes paying for this, so obviously I should have the final say in how it is done. Because this is America. Thank you, and happy birthday.