No Fireworks in Hermosa Keeps the City Green

Hermosa Beach doesn't do Fourth of July fireworks as part of its annual Independence Day tradition. That's way too conventional for a city that features an annual drinking and hurling competition right on the beach, and its own version of a bacchanalian Mardi Gras on the Strand, complete with Michael Jackson impersonation performances. 

Besides, who needs to blow up $115,000 worth of disposable income, like Torrance does at its Wilson Park extravaganza, when you've got rich neighbors in Redondo who will fork the bill for not one, but two 9 p.m. fireworks shows, one from a barge off the pier and the other from the Seaside Lagoon? 

Both shows are easily visible from Hermosa Beach, as well as the skyborne pyrotechnics from Marina Del Rey and even Santa Monica.

Frankly, Hermosa Beach doesn't have the dough to pay for a fireworks display, even if it were part of the local zeitgeist. The St. Patty's Day parade, New Years Eve celebration on Pier Plaza, holiday lighting event and Sunset Summer concert series all get the city budget guillotine for next year.

Torrance and Marina Del Rey are both eliminating their fireworks funding for 2011, and if Redondo and the rest of the cities in the South Bay had any sense or perspective about what century we're living in, or what their priorities should be, they'd stop burning their money and find a better way to celebrate our nation's independence.

I realize that this isn't the popular point of view, and that I risk being tagged as a holiday buzz kill, but I can't help but feel that the completely primitive appeal of big booms, bright flashes and pretty colors appearing magically in the sky has run its knuckle-dragging Cro-Magnon course.

Not only has this ancient ritual become the financial equivalent of stacking a big pile of $20, $50 and $100-bills in the public square and then setting them ablaze, but exploding toxic chemicals in the skies over our oceans and living spaces in the form of fireworks pollutes the air and water. 

It starts with igniting gunpowder to propel bombs into the night sky, filled with the same basic gunpowder used back in 1776 to fire our Revolutionary Army muskets, containing carcinogenic sulfur-coal compounds. And to create those cool red, white, blue, green, purple, and yellow colors in the sky takes a whole CSI episode's worth of toxic heavy metals and other noxious chemicals. 

Barium gives you bright green colors and is both radioactive and poisonous.  Another shade of green is thanks to boric acid.  Your brilliant blues come from using copper compounds, which also give you cancer-causing dioxin. Magnesium, titanium and aluminum are burned to create bright white. Burning strontium is where one shade of red color comes from and flaming lithium gives you another. 

Good old sodium chloride will produce orange-yellow fire; Lakers purple is achieved by burning a mix of potassium and rubidium. All of these chemicals cause sickness, specifically respiratory problems.

The last thing we need to add to the life-shortening pollution and greenhouse gases that nearby gas company refineries pump into our skies are more emission nails in our own children's coffins, especially when they're the result of optional displays of pride.  As the man said, "Pride goeth before the fall."

And especially when we could have better, more creative technology available that won't cause acid rain and water supply contamination, or airborne arsenic.  How about some advanced laser action combined with high definition image projection?  You can even make it 3D and have everyone wear electronic glasses if you like. 

Bottom line: our environment is in crisis today because of all the things we burn to power our world.  Burning more toxins and poisons overhead on the Fourth of July seems more like something we'd do to our worst enemies than for the amusement of our children.

Joe Galliani is a member of the Hermosa Beach Carbon Neutral City Committee and writes a weekly column about local environmental issues for Hermosa Beach | Patch.

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