ALLENTOWN, Pa. – With names like the Roaring Twenties, Survivor and Diablo, buying the boom is a nearly 3-billion-dollar-a-year industry for purveyors of pyrotechnics.<\/p>\n
“Today is the big one,” said Ralph Uldanetta of Phantom Fireworks on MacArthur Road.<\/p>\n
He says New Year’s Eve sales are only a fraction of 4th of July’s. However, for Lehigh County’s Bill Lyons, it’s his explosive end of the year celebration.<\/p>\n
“We’re gonna do some at eight o’clock, and then we’re gonna go back out for midnight if everyone’s still awake,” Lyons said.<\/p>\n
Entertainment for some, sensory encroachment for others, exploding right outside Donna Shull’s ground floor west end Allentown apartment.<\/p>\n
“It sounds like a bomb going off,” said Shull. “They throw then right down at the bottom of my window.”<\/p>\n
The 77-year-old expects fireworks well past 1 a.m. on New Year’s Eve.<\/p>\n
“What do you do when you hear it?” I asked her.<\/p>\n
“Just get scared,” she said, along with her two cats, who she says feel the same.<\/p>\n
Personal fireworks in Pennsylvania became legal in 2017 and remain a hot topic in Harrisburg.<\/p>\n
“People are not making wise decisions in terms of detonating these devices,” State Senator Judy Schwank said in a 2021 hearing on regulating fireworks.<\/p>\n
State law says you have to be 18 to buy, fireworks can’t be ignited or discharged on public or private property without permission, and not within 150 feet of a building or vehicle.<\/p>\n
Fines can hit a thousand bucks and include jail time. However, police have said it’s difficult to catch people in the act.<\/p>\n
“Fireworks are dangerous, but we want to make sure that we’re selling them to people and they’re going to use them responsibly,” said Uldanetta.<\/p>\n
He added that Phantom registers all customers, with a safety sheet included.<\/p>\n
“Your biggest piece of advice for anyone buying fireworks setting them off would be what?” I asked.<\/p>\n
” Do it sober, do it sober,” he said.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates more than 14,000 Americans were injured by fireworks in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – With names like the Roaring Twenties, Survivor and Diablo, buying the boom is a nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,39249,37,18221,39248,37979,39250],"class_list":{"0":"post-76282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-consumer-fireworks","12":"tag-harrisburg","13":"tag-new-year","14":"tag-new-year-celebrations","15":"tag-pyrotechnics","16":"tag-state-law"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}