by Paula Kully –
Who doesn’t love fireworks? I certainly do. They light up the night sky with explosive bursts of brilliant colour while we stand frozen in awe, looking up and marvelling at them.
Here on the Saanich Peninsula, residents celebrate Canada Day with the annual fireworks display in Sidney on June 30. The event attracts thousands of people who line the shores of the Salish Sea to watch as the bright lights sparkle and crackle with the enhanced reflection off the water below.
Last year there was an obvious faux pas with the fireworks show as the majority of the shells went off in one magnificent blaze of glory over the course of only a few minutes. Luckily, the technician had a backup plan waiting in the wings and the show went on.
Don McCauley, owner of AFA Fireworks and the man behind the scenes that brings the fantastic light show to the waters off Sidney each year, explains what went wrong: “I had spent weeks programing that show. We had done the safety checks and made sure there were no shorts with the firing system, specifically the wiring. The system was armed and we were waiting for the signal to go. The program had been running for about 15 minutes at that point; the laptop controls the whole system, this was where the weak point was. The program stopped running about 30 seconds into the show … that phrase ‘program is not responding’ came up. We had to disarm the system, try and quickly diagnose the problem, and I finally hit the arm button. Well, you saw the effects.”
As a professional working in the industry for 20 years, Don was determined to ensure it didn’t happen again. He went home and tried to recreate the problem and discovered that a safety program running in the background monitors the battery and shuts down the computer’s hard drive for protection when the battery gets to a certain level. After buying three batteries, a second laptop with a serial port and running the program 10 times plus another five before each show, Don is confident the problem will not be recreated.
This year, in honour of the 150th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation, the Town of Sidney and Don have a big fireworks show planned. As in past years, the show will go off to music, but new this year is the fact that the show will be accompanied by a live band playing at the end of Bevan Pier; the four piece band “The Strangers.”
In order to design the show, Don needs to know what the individual shells look like and the effect they have. A technical understanding is also necessary to work with the programs required to produce the show as everything is run through a digital firing system. The firing program he uses is called Q-fire and the sound design program is Goldwave. Between the two, Don spends approximately two weeks listening and relistening to the music score to decide on what he wants to see. A great deal of imagination and creativity goes into this part of the process as the light show needs to coincide with the music. In total at the time of writing, designing this year’s show to live music has already taken 30 hours.
Transporting the fireworks can also be a logistical challenge. They come from a company near Calgary, Alberta and must be shipped on a dangerous goods barge to the Island, then stored for no more than two weeks prior to the show.
The day of the show, Don has 10 hours of prep before even arriving on site while a crew of six people work for 10 hours from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. to set up all of the shells in racks on the barge that will be located on the water just past the end of Bevan Pier. This year’s show will feature approximately 1,500 to 1,800 “shots” with the biggest shell measuring eight inches and weighing 20 pounds.
Then, at approximately 10:15 p.m., Don will start the digital firing program, the band will play, the show will begin and we will once again stand in awe as we watch the sky light up!
