Before the Whistle and the Bang

The Southampton Days Committee contracted a new fireworks company to supply the community with its Fourth of July fireworks show. 

Tom McCullough, one of the many volunteers who make up the Committee, was put in charge of the 2011 fireworks show at the end of last summer.

"We start planning in September for the whole fair,” McCullough said. “It is an all year round thing from September on.” 

He researched many qualified companies and eventually chose D & M Fireworks. 

“We were able to save a good amount of money by switching over to them,” McCullough said. “One of the big changes was, we don’t have the ground effects anymore. Those are the most expensive parts of the show because they have to put them together by hand.” 

The amount of fireworks D & M uses per show varies due to the budget, time frame and special effects used. The company buys its fireworks from various factories throughout China. 

“They’ve been doing fireworks for thousands of years, so they’re the experts,” Skip Markacs said. 

Markacs, from D & M Fireworks, has great pride in the shows his company provides. The company uses many special effects. Clients can choose from a variety of firework shell groupings which contain many colors, patterns, shapes and special effects. 

Each shell has cakes, which Markacs describes as looking like a giant birthday cake, that go straight up into the air. The cakes go into fan shapes, Z’s, X’s, lines and comets. 

“We have whistlers,” Markacs said. “The people love the whistles. That’s one of the crowd favorites.”

Even though the contracted company changed, the safety standards set by the municipal and state government remained the same. Southampton Fire Marshal, Mark Showmaker, oversaw the public safety planning for and the execution during the event.

“We’re here to make sure that it is safe,” Showmaker said. “If any emergencies do occur, we handle them not only on-site but we’re responsible off-site at the same time.”

The Southampton Fire and Police departments collaborated with the surrounding areas. The Northampton Police Department, Northampton and Ivyland Fire Companies and the Sheriff’s Department all worked together to ensure a safe environment for the thousands of people who came.

According to Showmaker, the fireworks are restricted to a certain size launch shell. In the case of the Southampton Days fireworks show, they do not allow anything over a four-inch shell, based on the site constraints and the standards that must be followed by law.

For every inch of shell firework the company uses, they must be 70 feet away from the people, Markacs said. For example, the use of a four-inch shell required D & M to be at least 280 feet away from the closest spectators.

“We always like to have a little extra room because you can never tell with the wind,” Markacs said. “If we’re doing a show where we need 350 feet, we like to have 400 or 450. We always tell our crews to go by what the fire marshal says.”

Showmaker wanted to provide for a safer shell-launching space. The launching site was stationed on the soccer fields behind Klinger Middle School. There was an orange fence set up along the bottom of the hill.

“From that point is where we do the measurement for the restrictions for the shell launching,” Showmaker said.

He chose to do all the launching from this lower site for added protection.

“We have a drop off down onto the soccer fields and that gives us a safety buffer,” Showmaker said. “If something were to fall over, it hits the embankment that goes up. It’s an extra buffer… for safety.”

The state requires permits for events such as this due to the large amount of people in attendance. It spells out how many on-site and off-site ambulances need to be available, requires continual communication with a physician who oversees the plan and requires special items such as helicopter landing zones in case someone needs to be evacuated.

“It’s a long planning process for a one-night event, even though the fair’s a week-long event,” Showmaker said.

Physical safety buffers are not the only thing needed when dealing with fireworks. The fireworks company must have insurance and be licensed by the state and the federal government in order to legally set off a fireworks display.

A major task McCullough needed to accomplish was to make sure that the fireworks company had insurance, to which Southampton Days and Centennial School District needed to be added, and that Showmaker got a copy of the policy. He also acted as the liaison between the fire marshal and D & M Fireworks.

“My job is to make sure that if there’s a problem, then it gets handled,” McCullough said.

Markacs understands the importance in being well insured.

“You are dealing with a monster and the monster is going to bite, so you have to have big insurance,” Markacs said. “Even the safest companies occasionally have a problem with fireworks.”

Markacs said his crews always work with the same set of people so “everybody knows everybody’s function.”

“We’re really big on safety,” he said. “We don’t cut corners at all. You can’t do that, you really can’t.”

Following Markacs’s own safety standards as well as those of the fire marshal does not prevent D & M Fireworks from providing a crowd-pleasing show.

The average show ranges from 12 to 25 minutes. The Southampton Days fireworks show was set to be within 18 to 20 minutes. Markacs planned for Southampton Days as he and the pyrotechnic company generally does, with a goal to fill the sky with a variety of special effects.

 “The sky is filled the entire time with our shells,” he said. “Many times in the show people think it’s our grand finale, because we’ll have groupings of the crazy effects and the people go crazy.”

Keeping the crowd safe and entertained are among the top concerns the Committee faces when planning the Southampton Days fireworks show.

“You’re not going to know if you made the right choice until your money is blowing up in the air,” McCullough said. “You can’t return that.”

However, Markacs and the crews at D & M Fireworks feel that their growing reputation for safety standards and special effects is what helps them take shows from competitors.

 “What happens is, we go into an area and we do a show,” Markacs said. “And the towns around us see us and we wind up getting the towns around us.”