By Lauren Wanko
Correspondent
For lots of people, holidays wouldn’t be the same without them. Christmas, trees. Easter, bunnies. Fourth of July, fireworks.
“I think fireworks represent happiness,” said one beachgoer.
As beachgoers this morning looked for a spot on the sand, the Garden State Fireworks team was unloading 140 wooden racks of mortar or pipe for the Fourth of July fireworks at the Asbury Park boardwalk.
“This is definitely a larger show than what I regularly do on a daily basis,” said Garden State Fireworks Pyrotechnic Supervisor Ron Paduganao.
Garden State Fireworks orders many of their fireworks shells from China. They also manufactures them in their New Jersey shop. Paduganao builds the wooden racks. These have 10 pipes each. The day before a show they’re loaded onto a site. Today the team’s setting up 140 racks in three different fenced off areas on the beach for a total of 1,400 fireworks. Tomorrow they’ll bring the shells. They wait until the day of the show in case it rains overnight.
“We load it all individually in every single pipe,” Paduganao said.
There’s a fuse on the end of each shell. The team connects the shell fuse in the first pipe of each row with an Electronic or E match.
“An E match is an electrical firing wire which has a glass bulb on one end that bursts into flames into a heated blub which lights the fuse which continues the domino effect. This end is hooked up to a computer module which would give the main computer, the receiver, to give it the right charge to go set a specific set off,” Paduganao said.
How much does it cost to put on a fireworks show like this? “This would be around $25,000,” he said.
Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jacqueline Pappas says the city’s fireworks display dates back more than 100 years, although there was a break in the late ’70s. The fireworks have been lighting up the sky here year after year for a couple of decades.
Who pays for the show? “The show is paid for by Madison Marquette and iStar Financial, our major developers,” Pappas said.
The Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce says last year about 150,000 people visited their beach town over the course of the season and typically anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors and residents head to the boardwalk to see the fireworks show.
“If you take a $20 spending level for 15,000 people, that’s 300,000 in one evening,” Pappas said.
The Garden State Fireworks team still has a full day of work ahead before tomorrow night, days of work for about a 20-minute show.
“It’s well worth it, seeing the crowd going,” Paduganao said.