Last night literally as my hand touched my bedside lightswitch suddenly there came a hell of a rumbling
[Video: the last 90 second of rapid fire fireworks at night, mostly red white and gold, partly obscured by heavy smoke drifting to the right.]
The Canada day fireworks were canceled in ottawa on the first because we had a massive rainstorm (lots of local flooding, 4000+ basements with water in them, etc. 2nd most rain in 24hrs ever) and we were waiting to see if the show would be rescheduled (why we don't have a rain day planned idk)
... they set them off just before the city noise ordinance kicked in, on a condensed timer, with not only no warning but actively told the few people in the know not to tell. There are rumors that fire services might not have been told, or that even the technicians only found out like 30min beforehand, like, wtf?
So people are annoyed, pissed or just disappointed. And yeah there's some people saying hur dur the city fun forgot because others are complaining, completely missing that the complaining is because:
People wanted to go!
However, it was a work night and most people not at the festival were home or sleeping!
There are a lot of people this scared the shit out of (I was like 2ish Km from the launch site and it sounded like I was under them, the resonance from the high rate of explosions apparently made it louder than usual??)
Some people very much did not want to go!
Some people have ptsd or can't handle fireworks for other reasons and this was a shit thing to do to them! You can't brace it there's no warning!
Pets could not be medicated/contained beforehand if there wasn't any a warning!
People wanted to go!
Instead it was short and kind of tied (suddenly and secretly) to the start of bluesfest, a ticketed event unlike the free canada day event, relatively few got to enjoy them, and lots of people experienced it in a way they didn't enjoy.
I'm glad I got to see anything at all, I like fireworks, but I like many others would have liked to see the whole thing.
And all this because it seems the city had three options: set them off as a rescheduled event (potentially expensive), disarm and disemble (dangerous), or set off as secretly as fireworks can be set off, and they didn't want to arrange crowd management/traffic measures. So.
That's city management for you
