While recovering from the excitement of Christmas and New Year, while at the same time looking forward to our return to Firework Champions, checking out our customer reviews from December, and enjoying the sales the run up to Burns Night and Chinese New Year brings in, it’s only now that we’re able to provide our quarterly look at when fireworks were in the news at the end of 2016.
We’ll avoid the obvious Bonfire Night, Christmas, and New Year fireworks news, and look at the other stories that hit the headlines this year.
Next week, we’ll draw a final line under 2016 with a summing up of fireworks in the news for the full year.
Tragedy Strikes in Mexico
Only a few days prior to Christmas, tragedy struck in Mexico as a reported 31 people were killed by a fireworks explosion at the San Pablito fireworks market outside the city of Tutlepec.
A number of videos of the explosion and the aftermath were filmed by those close by on the ground and by those in their vehicles on the adjacent highway.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto immediately pledged to rebuild the fireworks market once the aftermath has been cleared.
You can read coverage of the incident from BBC News here.
Police Attacked with Fireworks on Halloween
Where there’s fireworks, sadly as we’ve written about so many times in the past, you can always trust there to be a collection of idiots wanting to use them as a tool of intimidation and violence. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that things like this aren’t a surprise anymore.
The latest entry for the idiot files comes from London, where police officers were targeted with fireworks on Halloween night.
You can read coverage of the story from Sky News here.
‘Commercial’ Fireworks Used in Wales Disorder
Another sad story for the industry came from South Wales, where police said that ‘commercial grade’ fireworks were used during disorder in the Pill area of Newport.
The trouble even led some residents to say they’d leave their homes during the period between Halloween and Bonfire Night, although thankfully the police were quick to charge eight people in connection with the unrest. Two of them were just 13 years old!
The Welsh Ambulance service even had to abandon some of it’s depots due to the trouble, with one notable person from within the service noting they’d never experienced anything on this scale, though police did say anti-social behaviour saw an annual increase in the area during the Halloween and Bonfire Night periods.
The BBC covered the story here.
Hillary Clinton Cancels New York Fireworks
We’re not about to wade into U.S. politics but this story links to perhaps the biggest news story of the whole year, let alone the last quarter of 2016.
In what was seen at the time as the first signs of Hillary Clinton’s campaign team realising they might be in trouble – which famously later turned out to be true – their planned fireworks display in New York was cancelled the day before the election. Whether this news motivated Trump supporters to turn out in even higher numbers, and made disheartened Clinton supporters stay home, we’ll never know.
You can read the Daily Mail’s coverage here.