Fireworks for the Fourth
In 1994, before fireworks nights became a weekly religious event in Pittsburgh, I did a feature story on the Zambelli fireworks company for the Post-Gazette.
Shooting the Works
July 1, 1994
By day, she is a clinical nurse, specializing in mental health counseling for folks over 70.
By night, especially Fourth of July nights, Terrie Bales is a pyrotechnician — a "shooter" who sets up and sets off the fireworks that light up our skies during fireworks season.
Bales is one of about 1,000 shooters nationwide who freelance for Zambelli Internationale Fireworks Manufacturing Company, Inc. of New Castle. Zambelli, as all good Western Pennsylvanians must know by now, is the world's largest manufacturer and exhibitor of fireworks displays.
As usual, the world-famous company will provide all the necessary rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air for Pittsburgh's Fourth of July show Monday night.
Sponsored by the civicly minded corporate wallet of WDVE, the fireworks show will be launched from barges parked in the Ohio River near the Point, starting at about 9:45 p.m. Monday.
This year's edition will be bigger and better than last year, promises the Zambelli company's Michael Richards, who scripted the whole show.
"Without a doubt, it'll be the largest fireworks display ever in Pittsburgh."
How large is largest?
"In excess of 5,000 devices will be used — probably 10 tons of explosives," Richards says.
A crew of four shooters, six laborers and a supervisor on three or four barges will unleash 20 minutes of aerial visual and sonic mayhem.
Richards is Zambelli's chief choreographer. Which means he scripted Pittsburgh's fireworks show on his computer, taking into account such local variables as the budget, the limitations of the site and the soundtrack of traditional patriotic songs and bombastic orchestral tunes supplied by WDVE.
Thinking visually and aurally and thematically, and keeping track of such things as crescendo and decrescendo, he decides exactly when to blast The Clarks' version of "America the Beautiful" over the sound system set up all over the Point.
Richards decides precisely when the smoke-choked shooters on the barges send up the exploding hearts, dancing Silver Crossettes, strobing White Tumbling Mums or booming red & blue Peonies.
Pittsburgh's is one of 200 Zambelli shows Richards will script this year, from humble Dormont's manually fired show to near-thermonuclear Louisville. Louisville is Dormont times a thousand, Pittsburgh times four and home of the biggest fireworks show in the country, "Thunder Over Louisville."
Like any good showman, Richards' overriding goal is to please the attendant masses. He's thrown a surprise or two into this year's script, but he won't give away clues — just that it won't violate a SALT Treaty.
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Zambelli Internationale has its world headquarters — and a hallway lined with the testimonials of such satisfied customers as Jimmy Carter and the government of Kuwait — in downtown New Castle.
But its fireworks are made and stored at a 400-acre site in the hills outside town.
Surrounded by woods and a barbed-wire-topped fence are dozens of low-tech, cement block buildings and sheds. Widely spaced apart and connected by looping gravel driveways, each building sports a big number and usually a "Danger No Smoking" sign.
Some buildings contain things like stacks of flattened cardboard boxes or steel pipes used as mortar tubes for firing the fireworks. Others — the magazines — are filled with explosives or a single kind of fireworks — 6-inch Pekings from China, 5-inch Sunnys from Japan.
Zambelli, which in an inherently dangerous industry has had only two serious explosions since it set up operations in New Castle in 1920, used to manufacture most of its fireworks. But now it purchases most of them from all over the world, says Chris Mele, 26.
Last week Mele was in the shipping building, Building No. 25, helping to fill a July 4th order for a Lula, Miss., riverboat gambling casino.
A long low table was covered with dozens of gourd-like fireworks — 4-inch to 12-inch, from Japan and China and Italy. Mele usually works as a salesman for Zambelli.
But during this time of the year -- when Zambelli does 70 percent of its business and puts on about 1,000 fireworks shows from coast to coast — Mele becomes a shooter.
He will work in Toledo Sunday and then hop a plane for Atlanta Fulton Stadium to entertain uraves ions "Thunder Over Louisville," which since it began four years ago, is the Big Bang of the fireworks universe.
In terms of size, Pittsburgh’s fireworks is above-average, Mele says, but it needs about three 18-hour days to be set up. The biggest fireworks used will be 12-inch Chrysanthemums, which climb to somewhere between 1,000 or 1,200 feet before erupting into their flowery effect.
About 30 Chrysanthemums will be used. Made by hand and looking like brown-paper-wrapped basketballs with tumors, the 12-inchers — like their smaller cousins — are loaded into steel pipes sunk in half-drums of sand lined up in the bottoms of empty river barges.
Their nearly four-foot fuses are lit electrically by flame-squirting "squibs" and an explosive charge — the tumor part — hurls them like cannon-balls straight up. Then they explode and perform their sparking, burning, shining, whistling tricks.
Zambelli, which Mele says is probably doing 50 July 4 shows in Western Pennsylvania this year, has free-lance shooters all over the country. The company packs the fireworks orders and sends them via rented trucks, with local shooters usually taking a percentage of the show's budget as their pay.
Manually fired shows like Dormont's — whose budgets are under $20,000 — are easier to set up but harder to shoot than the electrically fired shows, says Mele.
Weather is always a concern in the fireworks shooting biz, he says. A little rain won't hurt, but downpours and high winds pose major problems. The toughest thing about being a shooter, says Mele, is not having enough time to set up.
"It's demanding. You're usually shooting one night, then tearing down and you're right on the road again going to the next show."
After this weekend's rush, there'll still be plenty of state fairs, carnivals and rock concerts to work.
"I get a kick out of it," says the Indiana University of Pennsylvania criminal justice grad. "It's rewarding when you have a crowd go berserk after a show."
Mele wears earplugs when he shoots, though many shooters don't. He doesn't wear a hardhat, though many shooters do. Both pieces of safety equipment come in handy when a shell explodes early — say, 15 feet above the mouth of its launching pipe.
"A low-breaking shell can be really scary," he says, "but we don't have too many of them."
Rich Loffredo, who also was loosely filling cardboard boxes with firework shells, has been a shooter since he was 8. Like so many in his trade, he comes from a long line of shooters: His father and grandfather were shooters. So is his older brother Ray, who'll supervise Pittsburgh's fireworks show, and another brother, Frank, who just retired.
Loffredo, 46, is a Providence, R.I., roofer who works for Zambelli wherever it needs him — from Providence to Louisville to St. Thomas. "It's like a hobby," he says. He likes the whole deal. He's never been hurt And he says it's not dangerous at all unless you don't know what you're doing.
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Terrie Bales won't be working Monday night in Pittsburgh. She'll be in Aurora, Ohio, with her husband and two stepsons.
Surrounded by smoke and showered with burning shards of paper, she'll be dressed in her blue fire-retardant hat and work clothes and outfitted with earphones and safety goggles as she lights up the night near Sea World.
As she fires up each fuse by hand, she'll be careful to keep her head and hands away from the mouths of the steel or heavy cardboard pipes that serve as mortar tubes for the shells.
She'll keep a tarp over her fireworks and she'll watch out for shells that explode too soon. She'll be careful. She's never been injured. And, like most of her fellow shooters, she'll be having great fun blowing up things.
Bales, 41, who lives in Volant, near New Castle, became interested in fireworks early in life — her father was a shooter.
"I like it. It's exciting. It's something different." It's also pretty satisfying, esepcially when she hears the crowds roar their approval. "It's like getting an A on a term paper, she says. "It feels good."