Kelowna’s fizzling fireworks plans could mean another celebration is in the offing

Tens of thousands of dollars of Canada Day fireworks are sitting in limbo with Kelowna festival organizers awaiting information on whether they will be permanently snuffed out or used in a future celebration.

Due to a nearby fire requiring emergency resources and some questionable weather this past Canada Day, the Kelowna fireworks were canceled.

“So, the first thing I need to do is have a conversation with our fireworks producer of Big Bang fireworks,” Renatta Mills the Executive Director of Festivals Kelowna, the organization that puts on the Canada Day show, said.

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“They will tell us what state the fireworks are in right now because the show was fully set up. So they had to disassemble it and I don’t know whether that means the fireworks are not usable again or whether they can be reused.”

Mills is hoping to find out how long they can be in storage, as well.

That will tell them, she said, whether they need to hurry up and come up with a solution this summer or have the capacity to wait a few months and do something at the end of summer, or even push it further to the New Year’s Eve celebration.

“That’s what we need to understand because essentially fireworks are bombs at their base level,” she said. “Safe storage and disposal are incredibly important.”

The fireworks are actually produced and organized by Festivals Kelowna and they receive financial contributions from a number of partners, including the City of Kelowna, to fund them.

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“We usually budget about $25,000 for the fireworks each year, some years we have a bit more money so it’s a bit more of an investment and a bigger show, but that’s on average about what we commit to the fireworks,” she said.

That covers off  a variety of costs, including the labour for the actual show itself.

Whether that is something Mills can recoup remains to be seen.

“The fireworks producers will have already spent some time setting up the fireworks and getting them ready to go and then they had to disassemble them,” she said.

“That cost is real and we’ll still have to discuss that with them in terms of what that looks like. And then the materials on top of that will be a separate conversation. But   they’re wonderful partners and they’ve been with us in situations like this before when we had to cancel.”