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Using fireworks without getting hurt

Reported by: Kelly Dudzik
Email: kdudzik@fox16.com
Last Update: 6/22/2009 8:56 am
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You can start stocking up on fireworks for your Fourth of July parties.  Fireworks stands are open, but before you get carried away with what they have to offer, make sure you know how to set them off safely.

Visit Charles Rickett's North Little Rock fireworks stand and you'll find an explosives emporium.  You can turn your yard into the Desert at Night or get a Midnight Sunburn.  If you don't care about bothering your neighbors, set off some Thunder in the Jungle.  Don't let the pretty packaging fool you though. 

"They go about three-hundred feet in the air, and they are very dangerous if you put them in the tube wrong," says Rickett.

With 27 years in the business, Rickett says one of the biggest mistakes you can make is letting your children play with fireworks.  "The kids get out and roman candle fight and bottle rock fight and everything and they don't wear goggles and stuff like that even though they shouldn't be doing it," he says.

Every year, Little Rock firefighters see kids get hurt.  "There is absolutely no safe way to use fireworks.  A good alternative would be to go to a fireworks show.  Let the professionals do it," says Captain Randy Hickmon with the Little Rock Fire Department.

If you are going to try to recreate the big show at home, "just think before you go ahead and light the thing or you set it on something that's not level where it will turn over and hurt somebody, because you can get burned if that ball of fire hits you, it'll burn," advises Ricketts.

Hickmon says in 2006, fireworks burned 18-hundred buildings across the United States and nine-thousand people were hurt.

Rickett tells us you need to be at least two-hundred feet away from your backyard display to stay safe.
Copyright 2009 Newport Television LLC All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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