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Honolulu officials had never seen a more explosive New Year’s Eve. 

As 1926 turned into 1927, city streets were filled with the sounds of gunpowder igniting amid what one newspaper called . Fireworks landed in moving cars. A 14-year-old’s dress caught on fire when a. Four men were hospitalized with serious eye injuries. Another lost his hearing in a fireworks accident. 

It would have taken 1,000 police officers to arrest everyone who broke the city’s limited fireworks regulations, the . Something had to be done to protect life and limb.

“I wish it to be known that I am no killjoy, but I do object very strenuously to the sort of exhibition that was staged in Honolulu this New Year’s Eve,” the head of the police commission said, before vowing to help write a fireworks ordinance so strongly worded, “that we will be able to take by the throat people who do not see fit to obey its provisions.”

And thus began Honolulu’s nearly 100-year struggle to rein in residents’ use of pyrotechnics. 

Fireworks have been a source of joy and agony in Honolulu for more than a century. And in every generation, there has been a breaking point — a moment when the human cost of letting everyday citizens play with fire becomes too dear for the community to bear. 

For Oahu residents appalled at the recent deaths of four people and the injury of nearly two-dozen more over New Year’s Eve, the moment for action is now. 

But the moment for action also came in 1947, when injuries began to spike after amateur fireworks resumed in the wake of World War II. And in 1956, when firefighters responded to a record number of blazes and newspapers warned that the increasing size and power of the “pyrotechnical arsenal” of everyday citizens was an imminent threat to the city. And in 2001, after an errant firework set an 81-year-old woman’s home on fire, killing her and her two dogs. 

In each generation, efforts to address the matter have largely failed.

State and city officials have fought over who should be regulating fireworks, punting the problem back and forth again and again. New laws have been argued over, watered down, deemed unenforceable or routinely ignored.

“Is it on their consciences?” the Star-Bulletin wrote in a 1956 editorial, suggesting that city officials who bent to pressure from fireworks dealers and passed a watered-down and unenforceable fireworks control law “read and reread this: Fourteen-year-old Roy T. Itawa lost the tips of two fingers in a fireworks accident Friday night. He is one of four boy victims of fireworks in the past few days. Most of them were caused by making or playing with so-called toy bombs.”

Addressing ‘The Greatest Accident Menace’

City officials followed through on their pledge to take swift action in 1927, passing a ban on residents setting off fireworks, bombs, rockets and firecrackers in public spaces without a permit within a matter of weeks.

What people did in their own front yards, though, was up to them — as long as they did it before 12:30 a.m.

The regulation made city streets a little calmer, but didn’t do much to prevent injuries. Within a span of four days in 1937, , another child was hospitalized with severe burns, and three children were at risk of losing their eyesight from firecracker injuries.

“It happens all the time,” a Territorial health worker said, adding that firecrackers were “the greatest accident menace to the eyes” in the islands.

Even if fireworks were dangerous, they were also popular with residents and businesses — a fact of which politicians were well aware.

In 1947, when injuries began to spike after a World War II-era prohibition on fireworks lapsed, a proposal to require police permits to set off all fireworks was deemed “drastic” by newspapers.

That year, Territorial lawmakers heard passionate testimony in favor of the restrictions from a physician whose son had spent six months in the hospital undergoing skin grafts for a fireworks injury. But they were more persuaded by a presentation from the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which argued the proposal would be costly to city businesses and that restrictions would discriminate against the Chinese community. The legislators on Oʻahu, who in turn abandoned efforts to regulate fireworks a few months later.

By 1953, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was making forceful arguments that would be familiar to people today: fireworks were getting bigger and more powerful, New Year’s Eve was starting to sound like a war zone in the city and something had to be done.

The paper threw its weight behind efforts to create a uniform fireworks law in the islands. When the state House failed to even schedule a hearing for the proposal, the paper called on county officials to take local action. Also a no-go.

” … fireworks control is not the idea of strait-laced killjobs but the determined will of parents, doctors, police, fire officials and others who have been shocked by the heavy toll fireworks have taken.”

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1956

The paper wrote more than 30 fiery editorials on the issue over the next three years, but nothing raised the ire of its writers quite like the great fireworks battle of 1956. That year, it seemed like Honolulu was finally poised to take serious action. The Board of Supervisors, which fulfilled much of the role of today’s Honolulu City Council, drafted a tough bill based on a “model law” from the mainland. Then they let fireworks dealers submit their own bill for consideration.

The decision by supervisors to incorporate a number of amendments that had been submitted to them with “atom bomb-like secrecy” by the dealers generated significant public outrage. As amended, the bill was “worthless” according to the City Attorney’s office.

After a fair amount of public protest, the supervisors passed a watered-down compromise. More than a dozen community groups banded together to condemn the new city ordinance as “irresponsible,” doctors hailed it as “virtually valueless,” the police chief said it was unenforceable and the mayor vetoed it.

Several months later, the supervisors reintroduced a slightly modified version of the vetoed bill, by limiting the use of fireworks to July 4, Chinese New Year and New Year’s Day, and making it illegal for children under the age of 16 to buy them. This time the mayor signed it into law, noting that increasing the age to buy fireworks and banning their use outside of three holidays was not the kind of regulation he thought the city needed.

Rinse And Repeat

The fight between Honolulu supervisors and the mayor in 1956 was not the first — nor the last — time that city or state lawmakers passed a fireworks bill pretty much everyone agreed was flawed but accepted as better than nothing.

Throughout the following decades, numerous efforts were introduced and then watered down or cast aside entirely. That included an effort by in 1963, the passage of a seemingly unenforceable ban on “airborne incendiaries” passed later that year, and several failed attempts to further restrict any personal use of fireworks.

Accidental fires and injuries, meanwhile, continued to be an annual part of New Year’s Eve celebrations on Oʻahu — despite the airborne fireworks ban. In 1979, the Honolulu City Council passed a bill restricting the private use of fireworks on Dec. 31. The mayor at the time, Frank Fasi, vetoed the bill out of concern it would hurt fireworks distributors.

Although fireworks retailers were a minority, Fasi said, “I feel the government, acting in the best interests of the majority, must also protect the minority from unreasonable government actions.”

That year, fireworks were blamed for sparking 79 fires on Oʻahu on New Year’s Eve.

The county’s efforts to limit the use of fireworks were dealt a major blow in 1981, when a state court ruled that a requirement for people to purchase permits for fireworks on three holidays was invalid and lifted Oʻahu’s 18-year-old ban on aerial fireworks.

Though many of the laws governing fireworks were taken up at the county level, the issue of fireworks was also a perennial discussion at the state Legislature, with state and county officials often punting the problem back and forth.

After the court ruling invalidating the aerial ban, Honolulu council members passed a new partial ban and instituted another permit process. In a series of bills in the 1980s and ’90s, they stiffened the penalties for offenders, then loosened regulations that had required police to arrest anyone found setting off fireworks in the hope that issuing citations would lead to more enforcement. It did not appear to.

It’s a perplexing thing, the Honolulu Advertiser wrote in a 2001 editorial, that police say they have a hard time finding the source of individual rockets and citing people on New Year’s Eve.

“When a person is lost at sea, a good way to be found is to send up a flare,” the paper wrote. “But on land, we cannot get to the source of the very same thing.”

On New Year’s Eve of 2006-2007, the fire department put out 64 fires caused by fireworks. The more disturbing number, the Star-Bulletin’s editorial board wrote, is the number of people arrested by police: 0. 

“This lack of enforcement by the police is unacceptable,” the paper wrote.

‘A Lack Of Political Courage’

Throughout the decades, news coverage has revealed an alarming lack of coordination and communication between law enforcement agencies and elected state and county officials.

Honolulu lawmakers repeatedly passed bills that the county’s own police and firefighters said would be difficult or impossible to enforce.

In the 1990s, state lawmakers stepped in to address the flow of fireworks to Honolulu from the Big Island — where they were legal — and in doing so created a statewide law that superseded county rules and weakened the regulations Honolulu had in place.

The state Legislature enacted a statewide ban on aerial fireworks in 2000, and then spent another decade arguing about whether they should give counties the power to set stricter regulations. Earlier this year, City Council members raised concern about the fact that Oʻahu’s current penalties for illegal fireworks are now not even as strict as those set by the state.

�Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� residents, meanwhile, have not been shy about expressing their anger as generation after generation of politicians have failed to resolve the problem. State and county elected officials have been called “lily-livered,” “spineless” and “wishy-washy” for the laws they introduced or failed to pass.

The City Council’s approach to addressing the safety and health problems fireworks cause is “at best wishful thinking,” the Honolulu Advertiser wrote in a 1982 editorial that reflects a sense of frustration still felt by many today. “If anything it reflects a lack of political courage to deal forcefully, and honestly, with the mounting danger to many Oʻahu residents, especially in those crowded areas.”