Easter explosion shows clear and present danger of relaxing fireworks rules | Opinion
.jpg "A charred American flag sits on the tailgate of a burned pickup in front of the West Wichita house that exploded Sunday.")
On Sunday, we’d just finished our Easter dinner when we heard the explosion.
We were sitting with friends in our living room when we heard and felt the blast — strong enough to shake the house and rattle the windows.
Our immediate reaction: “What the hell was that?” The last time I experienced anything like this in our quiet suburban neighborhood was in 1998 when the DeBruce Grain Elevator blew up near Haysville.
As it turns out, a resident in a nearby development, six-tenths of a mile away, had just blown up his house.
Fireworks were immediately suspected, but it wasn’t until Monday that it was confirmed, sort of. The house is so badly damaged that investigators may never know exactly what happened.
What is known is that after a second explosion, firefighters had to fight the blaze from a distance, using long-range hoses. The police bomb squad spent hours hauling a large stash of unexploded fireworks to the bomb range, where they could be disposed of through controlled detonation without causing further harm.
The homeowner, later identified as Kendal James, 48, was killed in the blast and resulting fire.
The house was gutted; the area around it strewn with debris. Scorched wood rested on a neighbor’s roof; a charred triangle-folded American flag sat on on the tailgate of a Ford F-150 pickup in front of the house; the nose of the pickup was melted away, its windshield shattered and all four tires flattened.
“At this point in the investigation, it is suspected that the occupant was attempting to make or manufacture their own fireworks,” said John Ham, of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Kansas City. “What we typically see is people buying consumer fireworks, and then cutting into them, in an attempt to get to the powder inside to make something bigger. As soon as you cut into those, you’re really endangering yourself and everybody else.”
What happened on Easter happens more often than you might think. According to Ham, a fireworks hobbyist blew up a duplex in the the Kansas City suburb of Raytown less than two years ago. One man died, and six children and a pregnant woman were injured in that blast.
“Unfortunately, this is something that we see with some regularity and it almost always has the same very tragic outcome,” Ham said. “The chemicals being used to manufacture fireworks are unstable by nature . . . those chemicals when mixed together become very unstable and they become very, very susceptible to friction, heat, even static (electricity) is enough to cause an explosion. Oftentimes people, they may think they know what they’re doing, enter into a situation where they don’t have the level of experience needed.”
Within a few miles of Wichita, you can buy practically any kind of fireworks, from mortar shells to skyrockets. Some contain significant amounts of explosives that can be combined to create even larger fireworks.
There’s a kind of addiction that permeates south-central Kansas. If a big boom impresses the neighbors, a bigger boom will impress them even more, the theory goes.
But there are a lot of neighbors, myself included, who aren’t impressed today.
We’re saddened that nobody stopped Kendal James before he endangered the neighborhood — and we’re wondering how many of our other neighbors are courting disaster by stockpiling fireworks in their garages and basements.
After years of limiting fireworks to the small-scale “safe and sane” variety, the city government has been working toward relaxing its fireworks ordinance to align with surrounding communities and unincorporated county areas where the rule is pretty much anything goes.
Needless to say, this might not be the best time to do this.
I understand the impulse. It’s difficult to enforce a safety ordinance when your city is surrounded by smaller towns and a county that don’t. You can go to fireworks stores or tents outside Wichita and watch amateurs drive away with thousands of dollars worth of explosives stacked in the bed of a pickup.
In 2022, fireworks caused 57 fires and did $181,000 worth of damage in the city. If anybody should be considering a change in fireworks regulation, it’s not Wichita, it’s everybody around us (I’m looking at you, Butler County).
Fireworks fanatics — and they’re everywhere — are not just endangering themselves, but everyone around them.
The problem here is not that Wichita allows too little, it’s that surrounding areas allow too much.
