The skies will be alighted all over the CSRA for July 4th celebration come sundown. There will be no shortage of fireworks displays, and plenty of crowds gathering — from along the Savannah River to the Augusta Common downtown to Evans Towne Center Park.
Augustans and GreenJackets fans have SRP Park’s annual fireworks show to look forward to after a game against the Myrtle Beach Pelicans. Though the pyrotechnicians will be setting up towards evening, the visual festivities have been coordinated well in advance, said Augusta GreenJackets general manager Brandon Greene.
“We usually have our shows booked around December, prior to the season, once we get our baseball scheduled for the next year,” Greene said. “We usually get that on the first of September. Once we get that, we kind of start planning out our promotions and our different things that we do.”
The park typically hosts somewhere between 10 and 13 fireworks shows each season, usually on Saturdays and holiday weekends — including, of course, Independence Day.
Pyrotechnic operators are required to have at least 20 hours of training from a national organization, such as Pyrotechnics Guild International (PGI), to be certified to operate fireworks for public display in Georgia.
“It’s a pretty intense course,” said Freedom Fireworks technician Robert Clemons, who will be coordinating the Boom! In the Park show Tuesday night in Evans. “We teach a few different things as far as what we’re working with, products, things to expect within the shoot site, different precautions that we’ll take and, overall, what displays are supposed to look like.”
The differences between the 1.3g fireworks — the specialized explosive devices used for public displays and shows, and 1.4g, or consumer grade fireworks — those one might buy to set off for the Fourth in one’s backyard — are more of degree than of kind, notes Clemons, with professional grade fireworks being higher quality and requiring more sophisticated preparation.
“We all like to do those, and I do those in my spare time as well. Some of them have some really great effects,” said Clemons about consumer grade fireworks. “But when you get more advanced, you can get more technical with where your effects are going, or what type of effects you want to go in certain places… down to the seconds.”
The 1.3g products are more defined, allowing a technician to craft a display, choosing colors and shapes, such as the peony, the classic, round burst of bright dots in the sky.
The size of the shells usually determines how high the fireworks shoot up when set off, from 200 feet in the air, to 2,000 and sometimes higher (and bigger).
Shooters can physically “hand fire” the explosives, or use an electronic igniter, though certain larger sized fireworks require the latter setup as a safety precaution, with technicians being at least 25 feet away from the device when they ignite.
“We found a very good spot here at the ballpark where we can set up,” said Greene, noting that staking a space where, per regulations, fireworks setups were sufficiently far from people in the stands, in boats on the river and elsewhere, proved a challenge during the SRP Park stadium’s construction.
“Once we got that coordinated, it’s been really simple,” he said. “Those guys and girls show up, get set up about 6 o’clock on a 6:05 p.m. game, we usually try to shoot around 9 p.m. So it takes about two hours to get ready to shoot, and off we go.”
Greene said the pyrotechnicians get mostly free rein in designing the fireworks extravaganzas, save for nights with a theme.
“There are certain occasions, like Clemson night that we have coming up later this month, we’ll obviously want to try to get orange and purple just to match the promotion,” he said.
Clemons compares the process of planning a firework display to working from a playbook in sports. A keen, professional knowledge of the products one is working with, and their optical capabilities, leaves space for a technician to be creative.
“We at Freedom like to do what’re called ‘power musicals,’” said Clemons. “We think of them as ‘sky songs.’ In a song, you’ll have a beginning, you have the body, then you’ll have the hook of the song, and sometimes you’ll even have a bridge and that’s generally how we design the firework shows.”
Clemons also made sure to mention how excited he was at the name of the Evans event, and has planned for a “big show” at Evans Towne Center Park, with wide range of high displays “spreading out the sky.”
“I plan on keeping it consistent with beautiful colors, beautiful effects,” he said. “You can definitely expect a ‘boom in the park.’”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
