This past week, while many people were out celebrating the Spring Festival holiday, I was stuck in my apartment with a disease I might fairly compare to demon possession in terms of severity. The upside of this condition was that I got to spend a lot of quality time listening to, watching, and being startled by my neighbors’ firework displays. Somewhere between the five-hundredth car alarm set off by firecrackers and the firework someone rocketed into my apartment window, I got to wondering: is all of this really safe?
Grasped in the throes of my malevolent malady, however, I then forgot all about the question again until I ran into this NYT article about how 15 people were killed over the holiday because some idiots in Changle decided it would be a good idea to set off fireworks at their table inside a restaurant. My use of “idiots” here is editorial; the Times didn’t report that they were idiots but they’re setting off fireworks inside, I think we can all do the math.
Having once again remembered the question, I did some digging and discovered that the Chinese government doesn’t really have national-level regulations for firework use, although there are provincial and local-level laws, and that many regulations aren’t often enforced.
A look into recent Beijing firework-related injury statistics had me even more convinced that Spring Festival was murdering innocent Chinese people when I discovered that since lifting a ban in 2006, there have been “two deaths, more than 1,500 injuries and 2,400 fires caused by mishandled firecrackers.”
As it turns out, though, regulation does not equal safety. In some numbers crunching for my other blog, I discovered that actually Americans injure themselves with fireworks around the 4th of July at a much higher rate than Chinese people do around Spring Festival (if the Beijing statistics are indicative, anyway).
So it turns out the Spring Festival tradition of making things explode all over the place for days on end isn’t killing anything other than my ability to sleep past 7 A.M. I was really hoping for some numerical support for my complaints but I’ve been foiled once again by the statistically-proven pyromania of Americans. Guess I’ll just have to go back to complaining about the cold.
(Bonus activity for bored commenters: count the instances of alliteration in this post. It doesn’t count if you have to look up what alliteration is first. It’s not an impressive number or anything, but hey, you said you were bored).
i was bored.
it looks like 3 alliterations:
“my malevolent malady”
“local-level laws”
“actually Americans”
and 2 partial alliterations”
“statistically-proven pyromania”
“digging and discovered”
i must admit, even after you warned me, i was hoping for more.
it was a quick count though so maybe i missed some!
That’s actually more than I thought there were. I just remembered writing “malevolent malady” and was curious. In the future, though, I promise to make my posts more full of weird goodies like that. This one would have more if it had occurred to me before I started writing.
Fireworks have always been safe. The fact I can barely hear out of my right ear after a fire cracker blew off prematurely about a half inch from it when I was in 7th grade and trying to throw it at a friend is just further evidence of this.
Fireworks could be better, but firecrackers are definitely dangerous. My parents are both doctors in a small town in Hunan province, and from what they’ve told me and i’ve seen myself, almost every year there are victims coming to hospital with their figure blown off or some other injures, mostly children in this case. A few years ago I’ve seen with my own eyes a boy who hurt his hand while playing firecrackers.
As for myself, i never liked firecrackers. They are nothing for the good.