Fireworks shell misfires; 37 hurt

Published 10:11 pm Saturday, July 5, 2008

DES MOINES, Iowa — A Fourth of July fireworks shell misfired in a northern Iowa town, sending a fireball skidding down a street into a crowd of spectators and injuring 37 people, officials said Saturday.

Most of the people treated after the Friday night accident in Charles City suffered minor injuries, city fire department spokesman Eric Whipple said.

It appears there was a misfire involving 13 racks of firework tubes during the finale of the city-sponsored show, Assistant Fire Chief Dave Boehmer said Saturday.

Officials didn’t yet know why the fireworks malfunctioned, Boehmer said. Inspectors from the state fire marshal’s office in Des Moines visited Charles City on Saturday.

“It appears they went horizontally across the ground, some of them,” Boehmer said of the fireworks.

Witnesses told the Charles City Press that a large fireball veered toward the crowd gathered downtown on lawn chairs and blankets.

“It was like a bunch of little fireworks just coming toward us,” said spectator Emily Watson. “They started to explode. It was just like skating right across the street and then I saw them exploding right in the street here. … In a split second, it started coming at me.”

Brenda Schweiger said she feared for her life.

“My exact thought was, ‘This is it, we’re going to die,”’ she said.

In New York, a popular beach on Long Island was evacuated at the height of the holiday weekend after stray, unexploded fireworks washed ashore the day after a July Fourth show, state parks officials said Saturday.

Roughly 2,000 visitors were told to leave Jones Beach immediately after the seaborne shells began turning up around midday, officials said.

Beachcombers, parks staffers and lifeguards spotted the errant explosives, some of which measured 8 inches across, said George Gorman, deputy regional director for state parks.

Police scrutinized the sand and water from all-terrain vehicles, boats and helicopters. They dug into garbage cans to make sure no explosives had been picked up and thrown out.

The beach was to remain closed until sunrise today as authorities continued searching for any remaining fireworks. None had exploded, and no one had been hurt, Gorman said.

The shells apparently stemmed from Friday night’s show, launched from an offshore barge by Farmingdale-based Bay Fireworks.

President Charlie Rappa said the company takes care to keep track of shells that don’t fire, and he was unsure how any could have bobbed to the beach. The showwent off normally, he said.

In years of overseeing fireworks displays at Jones Beach and elsewhere, “I’ve never seen an anomaly like this,” he said.