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comment by cgod
cgod  ·  1720 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 3, 2019

A bunch of guys at my wife's work do firework shows. It sounds like a grind but they say the money is good.





goobster  ·  1715 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No, the money is terrible. We get about $1,000 for this show.

To transport the show in the U-Haul truck from the fireworks factory to the site, you must have a Commercial Driver's License (CDL). This is the same license that semi truck drivers need. When you get your CDL, all of your penalties for poor driving are doubled, and the allowances are halved (for things like blood-alcohol level, to determine whether you are DUI, or not).

This is the driver's license you drive with every single day, regardless of whether you are transporting fireworks from the fireworks plant to the site of the show.

It takes a minimum of 5 people about 10-12 hours to put on a show of this size. (And Blaine, WA is NOT a big show.)

Build and set up racks for the mortars, then dig 5 yards of sand to build berms along both sides of the racks you built. (From noon to about 7:PM.)

Around 6 or 7 you go through all the fireworks and prep the fuses, assess any damage to any of them, and generally make sure everything is ready to go. Then you load the mortars with the shells, and set up any ground-effect fireworks.

Now you need to do security for the next 2-3 hours, as your team guards thousands of feet of perimeter from drunks and kids, who want nothing more than to sneak in and set off all your fancy fireworks with their lighters.

If this is an electrically-fired show, plan about 3 hours to run wiring, tests, and configure the radio communications and go through the script for the firing order and to catch any mistakes in the script.

Finally, about 10 to 10:15 or so, it gets dark enough and you can shoot the show!

WOO HOO! 20 minutes of thrilling fun, danger, and big booms.

Then you have to immediately get back on perimeter duty to protect the site from any public incursion (you also need to make sure all the guns are empty, put out any little fires, and check to see that everything fired properly and you don't have any live ordinance still on site).

After an hour or so, everything has cooled down, and you can begin tear-down. Digging all the racks out of the sand, loading everything back in the truck, cleaning the site (in the dark), and assessing the area for any potential hazards that kids might find the next day. (Unexploded 'stars' or fuses or other composition that came out of the shells and didn't burn, etc.)

The truck is a target for vandalism, so you either need to get it back to the fireworks plant tonight (it's now 2:AM), or have a safe place to store it (NOT a motel parking lot!) for a couple hours so you can get a nap in.

For $1000.

For 5 people.

We do this for fun, only. You can't make a living at it.