If you grew up on the west coast, I think you never quite grow accustomed to the east coast thing where every neighborhood sounds like it’s having a moderately disorganized battle each evening for a week around the 4th of July.
Alright alright, I give. Most of the west coast is apparently a veritable war zone too. Where I grew up, we had really high wildfire risk, so maybe that’s why my memory isn’t of *all this.*
I NEVER had to deal with fireworks when I lived on the East Coast. I now live just outside Seattle and there were giant explosions on my street from 4 PM until 2 AM. And they're banned but no one cares and it's not enforced.
I mean, it's hard to get all pissy at people (even though I do) when there are GIANT FIREWORKS STANDS allowed to, legally, sell ALL THE FIREWORKS.
Perhaps we could start there?
It's INSANE around here for the third night in a row. People across the road in the very modest post-war tract homes with junk in the yards sink about a grand into fireworks every damned year. All legal to buy but illegal to set off. 🤔
Rainier Beach was bad when we lived there but the unincorporated area between the Seattle and Renton city lines is nightmarish. A group set up a giant fireworks installation IN AN INTERSECTION. Not a peep out of KCSO.
We see a lot of family-style groups in the various residential intersections in the South Delridge/White Center area. I am curious about the law enforcement priorities in Seattle proper, because there doesn't seem to be much attention to it.
I am anti-carceral generally, but there needs to be SOME kind of enforcement b/c this is a public safety issue. I reported one last week but they'll just get a letter reminding of them of the laws. I'd like to see fines, or fire departments hosing things down and ruining whatever remains.
I have lived in the Seattle area for more than 35 years, and it's gotten worse and worse as time has advanced.
Bans do nothing if the PD won't enforce them. And very few local PDs even make a token effort.
Nah. NoVa, rural central PA, rural south NJ. (Also Atlanta but I know that doesn't count as "East Coast") One of the few *good* things about the NJ stint was not having to treat July 4 like a war situation--there just weren't any fireworks.
I hear a lot more fireworks out here in Silicon Valley (though the loudest ones are commercial, between cities and Great America) than I did in east-central NJ, but driving to DC in summer as a kid always included seeing a LOT of fireworks stands.
I think there is an implicit assumption that "it's just one night" [note: It ABSOLUTELY is not] and it's not worth either the labor or the bad community relations to enforce. But we have to either be refugees from the noise or drug the whole household to bear it, which is...not ideal.
(The context here, for anyone coming to this conversation outside my followers, is that my spouse is an Afghanistan vet with PTSD. We also have a dog & used to have cats. And I get red-in-my-vision angry at the noise and the selfishness and the harm to my family.)
I am lucky in that my cat is unbothered, as am I, but it’s ANNOYING
and it is all the time here. Sure, more on holidays, more in summer, but absolutely year round nonsense on my block
Yep. We've got a household near us that sets them off for sports team wins (Seahawks reliably, sometimes NBA, sometimes during other playoffs) and there are others who just do it for the heck of it. Guy building a house across the street is setting them off at the end of workdays!
