Honolulu Fireworks Accident Is A Fatal Turn In A Long-Running Problem
A 2023 Civil Beat investigation found that authorities often failed to track the origins of illegal caches or build bigger legal cases.
Illegal fireworks have been exasperating residents and causing injuries for years in 贬补飞补颈驶颈, with authorities reciting the same list of reasons the pyrotechnics are difficult to control.
This New Year鈥檚 Eve, what had been considered largely a nuisance took a deadly turn in Honolulu, with at least three residents killed and more than 20 injured, including children, when a cache of fireworks in a Salt Lake garage caught fire and exploded.
It was the proverbial accident waiting to happen, based on what Civil Beat found when it investigated in 2023.
That report exposed several incidents in recent years in which authorities confiscated large caches of fireworks, but failed to track where they had come from or who was responsible. Aerial fireworks like the kind that went off across the city on New Year鈥檚 Eve are prohibited.
With no clear lead on fireworks enforcement, and a patchwork of jurisdictions at the port 鈥 the most likely point of entry 鈥 many cases simply fizzled. And while the police sometimes came upon large caches like the one that exploded just before midnight on Tuesday, Civil Beat found no evidence that they tried to trace the origins of the shipments or build bigger legal cases.
Fireworks Sent Back To Mainland And No One Charged
In one 2022 case, a contractor for shipping companies discovered 13,500 pounds of fireworks in a container because the weight did not match the listed contents. The shipping company consultant notified the Coast Guard, which took apart the container.
But the fireworks, worth $2.7 million, were merely sent back to the mainland for destruction and the shipper and would-be recipient went scot free.
have found that some fireworks are brought in legally for large-scale official displays, then diverted to individuals. Others are just brought in with no official permitting by anyone. And in recent years, there have been reports of residents buying kits to assemble their own fireworks, shipped by air.
Many of the illegal aerial displays are thought to come through the port, and part of the problem is balkanized jurisdiction. The Coast Guard, for instance, focuses on protecting the harbor facilities, not searching for fireworks.
In the 2022 case, other agencies could have gotten involved, such as the FBI or the state Department of Public Safety. But there also could have been problems in the chain of custody because they were discovered by a private consultant. No legal action was ever taken.
Sometimes large caches of fireworks are discovered not at the port, but at the residences where the fireworks end up.
A U-Haul Full Of Fireworks
On New Year鈥檚 Eve in 2021, a Kailua resident called the Honolulu Police Department, worried that a neighbor would spark a fire by setting off aerials.
People at the party claimed they did not know the owner of the house the fireworks were coming from and the police found a U-Haul van on the street containing 450 pounds of fireworks.
A woman who lived in the house was cited. But the police report contained no evidence that police looked into the renter of the U-Haul. As almost always happens in such cases, the Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney鈥檚 office dropped the charges.
Civil Beat鈥檚 investigation found that in the five years before 2023, 94% of fireworks citations were dropped.
That investigation also uncovered the case of Allan Badua, whose four citations for fireworks over five years all were dismissed, including one in which police found 400 pounds in his living room.
In that latter case, HPD stated that the violation 鈥渨ill not be pursued criminally due to insufficient evidence needed to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.鈥
On New Year鈥檚 Day 2021, HPD found 25 pounds of fireworks in boxes along 50 feet of a residential street in Kailua. HPD said 鈥渢here are no investigatable leads,鈥 and it was dropped.
In many cases, HPD referred the citations to the Prosecuting Attorney鈥檚 Office, which then failed to pursue them in court. A spokesman for Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm told Civil Beat that witnesses are reluctant to testify against neighbors.
In a 2019 report, HPD said the lack of prosecutions made it difficult to rein in the illegal displays. Eight years earlier, police had cited other barriers to cracking down, including the high burden of proof for criminal convictions, lack of staff for forensic analysis and the cost of storing the confiscated fireworks.
HPD had previously tried dedicating officers just to fireworks, but they kept getting pulled into higher priority cases.
Federal Agencies Stopped Making Cases
Federal agencies used to get involved in fireworks cases, too, but Civil Beat鈥檚 investigation found that they largely dropped out of enforcement. After , U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had conducted no operations from 2018 to 2023.
Part of the problem is a lack of a clear lead agency to seize fireworks at the port. Though a number of state and federal entities enforce various regulations, none of them have the power to simply open up cargo at random to search for fireworks.
The Coast Guard, for instance, can either conduct random inspections or cite a cause for looking more closely at a container, such as a leak.
Any program of random inspections also could interrupt the finely tuned movement of goods at the port. Dogs can sniff for contraband fireworks, but they can only cover so much ground in the hot environs of the waterfront.
Experts know how to look for tip-offs, such as a container shipped by an individual, who paid cash to avoid tracing, rather than a company.
In 2023, the Legislature calling for the Department of Law Enforcement to set up a task force to try to clamp down on illegal fireworks.
The task force in its first five months of operation.
In the first half of 2024, the task force . But as was apparent to anyone in Honolulu on New Year鈥檚 Eve, much is still getting through.
UPDATE: Gov. Josh Green said in a press release Wednesday afternoon the task force has seized 227,000 pounds of illegal fireworks to date “but incidents like this remind us of the ongoing challenges we face.”
