Jul 1, 2008

Stanford cancels fireworks show

Campus construction too close to pyrotechnic zone

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer

Stanford University has canceled its traditional July 3 fireworks this year, due to conflicts with nearby construction, officials said Monday.

For more than a decade, the university has hosted a popular concert and fireworks finale the day before the Fourth of July. This year, a concert featuring the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra will go on as planned, but without the fireworks, event spokesman Robert Cable said.

The new Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research is being built within the zone where fireworks shells could fall, Cable said. The three-inch shells used in the show require a minimum distance of 210 feet from spectator areas, vehicles and buildings.

"Despite our best efforts, there was no other place where we could arrange for a safe and visible deployment of fireworks," he said.

For most locals, the next closest place to watch fireworks will be Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheatre. Last year, the ticketed event drew around 8,000 area residents, said Aaron Siuda, spokesman for Live Nation, which runs the amphitheater's events.

Pyrotechnics operator Dan Nitzan, a Palo Alto resident, said this year's show will be the largest in the amphitheater's history.

Employing between 500 and 600 shells, this year's display will include new pattern fireworks, including cubes, smiley faces and umbrella shapes, Nitzan said.

Also new this year will be shells in "colors you don't normally think of as fireworks colors," including tangerine and aqua, he said.

And since the show overlaps with a concert by the San Francisco Symphony, the fireworks have to be launched in a more rapid succession than traditional shows, he said.

"This show will be quite fast and furious," Nitzan said. "Just at the end, when it can't get brighter, it gets louder."

When choreographing this year's show, Nitzan relied in part on the symphony's musical selections.

To go with the theme of this year's event, "A Salute to Heroes," the symphony will be playing songs from heroic films, including "Apollo 13," "Rocky" and "Superman," Siuda said.

Months ago, the symphony e-mailed Nitzan recordings of its songs and he charted the event's "storyboard" on his computer, choreographing the sequence of shells to accompany the music's "peaks and valleys."

During the event, the symphony's tech director will follow a specially marked score, calling out shell cues to keep the musicians and fireworks crews in harmony, Nitzan said.

"In the old days we would manually fire the show with a road flare. Now we use remote-control electrical detonation," Nitzan noted.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, Nitzan also has to spend hours filling out the paperwork that allows the explosives to be delivered to the amphitheater.

Ultimately, the audience's satisfaction with the show depends on its timing and delivery, Nitzan said.

"There's lots of psychology involved," he said. Nitzan said he prefers to slowly build up speed and intensity, pause, trick the audience with a "false finale," resume firing and close with a bang.

"If you can play enough games with the audience, then when you finally do finish the show, they feel like 'wow, that was the best show ever,'" he said.



E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.