Sky City plans huge fireworks show

By Jim Tiffin
Cibola County Bureau

PUEBLO OF ACOMA — Those colorful displays of light in the night sky, accompanied with varying levels of “boom,” on Friday night at Sky City Casino Hotel, will be from fireworks made in the U.S..

The Independence Day celebration on Friday includes a free barbecue and music by the James Douglas Band by the pool.

The annual July 4 show kicks off at dusk.

Steve Frantz, vice president and co-owner of Western Enterprises in Oklahoma, said the Acoma show will be a “very high-grade production.”

China owns most of the fireworks market in the United States, he said, but his company manufactures most of its products locally.

“Chinese fireworks are hard to see, the colors are washed out, because the shells used are cheap,” he said.

Those shells are the casings the various chemicals that make the displays and colors in the sky.

Frantz said his company does not just do fireworks for Independence Day, although that is the biggest day of the year. Year round there are baseball games, football games, civic celebrations, all using fireworks.

Up in the sky

There will be no ground displays, most of the fireworks will be between 600 to 800 feet in the night sky, a few will be at 300 feet.

Western has been in business for 18 years and has developed its own chemical mixtures to light up the sky, Frantz said.

One of the fireworks displays will be flowers. They start on the ground and go up into the sky like a flower.

There will be 2,182 shells exploded in about a 20-minute show, he said.

Some fireworks shows take as long as 15 or 20 seconds between shells. This show will have many shells exploding simultaneously and none lasting longer than five seconds between displays.

“We want to make sure there is something going on all the time,” he said.

There are mortars buried in the ground and timing cables are linked to a computer panel where a technician monitors the computerized program.

At some points during the show there will be 20, 30 or 40 shells going off at the same time. During the grand finale there will be a flurry of white, then blue then red shells, depicting American colors.

Traffic control

When the fireworks show is over, about 9:30 p.m., the entrance to Interstate 40 will be closed

All traffic will be routed north to old U.S. Route 66, New Mexico Highway 124, and directed to either exit 104 for eastbound traffic or exit 100 for westbound traffic. This will last about an hour, then traffic will be allowed to access Interstate 40 at the Sky City exit 102.

Increased patrols and traffic enforcement will be provided by Acoma and Grants police departments, Cibola County Sheriff’s Department and New Mexico State Police.

On the net: www.skycity.com; www.fireworksbywestern.com

To contact reporter Jim Tiffin call (505) 285-4560 or e-mail: jtiffin.independent@yahoo.com.