Photo illustration courtesy of the MLFA
Watch the fireworks show at the Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival on Saturday, Sept. 10. The show starts at dusk.
For John Fischer, there’s nothing like the thrill of shooting fireworks off a barge for the Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival. The big booms and the colorful starbursts are all just above his head.
The fireworks show for the 46th annual festival is scheduled to start at dusk, or about 8:30 p.m., on Saturday, Sept. 10. The show lasts about 20 minutes.
As is tradition, a tugboat holds a barge in position 800 feet off of the waterfront, while hundreds of fireworks in all colors, shapes and sizes are fired from the barge and into the night sky.
“It’s a celebration,” said Kathy Wisbeck, fireworks chair. “It’s almost like this is the last hurrah for summer.”
Fischer’s family-run Port Gardner Fireworks Co. has been the go-to company for festival fireworks for the last 15 years. The company merged with Wolverine West Fireworks LLC in 2010, but the Fischers still run the show.
“They’re a family that sets off the fireworks,” Wisbeck said. “They take a lot of pride in doing a very nice job for us. They just do a phenomenal show.”
“They do a lot of other Northwest shows, but suffice to say, ours is their favorite.”
Pre-show preparation
Friday before the show, the Fischer crew will be prepping a barge for all of the fireworks, to then be pulled by a tugboat from Seattle to Mukilteo the next day.
It’s an all-day job, Fischer said.
Trucking the fireworks from storage is a job in itself. The company hires help from the Everett Gospel Mission to load a truck with all the equipment and display shells they’ll need.
Once in Seattle, preparations include setting hundreds of launch tubes up in racks on the barge and packing them all in sand. The launch tubes are set up in rows across the 140 X 40 foot barge, according to size.
A launch tube is “just like a big cannon,” Fischer said. “If you looked at it sideways, it would look like a cannon.”
En route from Seattle to Mukilteo, the crew – Fischer, his son, his brother and his nephew – will be busy on the barge, loading the launch tubes with fireworks and wiring them to a control board. For the festival show, they’ll load about 450 display shells.
During the show
A large control board with hundreds of electrical circuits allows the crew to fire shells on cue. A smaller control board fires only during the last 40 seconds of the show – the grand finale.
“That controls the entire show,” Fischer said. “We’re firing these electronically.”
An electronic ignition sent through the wires from the control board simultaneously lights a black powder fuse to shoot a display shell into the sky and lights the shell’s time delay fuse to make it explode once it gets there.
Fischer keeps a chart of all the shells they’ll fire from start to finish, so he knows what’s going up in the sky at all times. A timer shows the crew when their 20 minutes is up.
They shoot 3-4 fireworks at a time, to make a neat myriad effect in the sky. During the finale, they fire more than double that, or 8-10 at a time.
“We don’t want it to go too fast, but we don’t want it to go too slowly,” he said.
The crew – Fischer calls them “sky artists” – stays behind a sandbag bunker during the show for protection. They wear motorcycle helmets, flame-retardant coveralls, gloves, boots and safety glasses.
Also for safety, the show has to be OK’d every year by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Mukilteo Fire Department.
“Once in awhile we have a ‘low break’ where the shell doesn’t go up as high as it’s supposed to, but that doesn’t happen very often,” Fischer said. “We haven’t had any accidents or fires.
“We’ve been in business for 22 years, and we have a perfect safety record.”
Ordering the shells
The company imports its fireworks, mainly from China. They order fireworks – $19,000 worth – for the festival, from catalogs that show them exactly what the shells’ starbursts look like in the sky.
They like to buy the variety packs with lots of different-sized shells, which tend to go over well with the audience. They get a lot of 5- and 6-inch shells because that’s “the best bang for your buck – no pun intended,” Fischer said.
They special order the bigger shells, up to the 12-inch, which hang in the sky so long that they fall all the way back down to the water. Those are the crowd pleasers, Fischer said.
“People love the ones that hang forever in the sky,” he said.
They keep photos and videos of past Lighthouse Festival shows so they know what looks good and, thus, what to order the next year. However, they also buy the latest and the newest fireworks available.
“We let them pick it, and they always try to throw in something different, something new,” Wisbeck said. “I think they out-do themselves every year.”
The fireworks are sponsored by the city of Mukilteo, Paine Field Airport, Boeing Co. and Aviation Technical Services.
Where to go
Wisbeck recommends festival-goers stake a spot on the beach to watch the fireworks at least 20 minutes before dusk. If not at the beach – which is very popular – then somewhere close at Mukilteo Lighthouse Park or up by Rosehill Community Center.
“You can’t beat it,” Wisbeck said of the show’s waterfront setting. “You’re on the beach, and it’s like the fireworks are right above you. It’s phenomenal.”
Actually, you can beat the beach. The crew on the barge literally gets to watch the fireworks right over their heads.
“Because we’re right underneath, it’s something entirely different,” Fischer said. “It’s kind of like we’re seeds inside a giant chrysanthemum.”
http://www.mukilteobeacon.com/community/article.exm/2011-09-07_putting_on_a_fireworks_show
