Modesto officials continue ‘zero tolerance’ of illegal fireworks

As the drought has forced water cutbacks that are turning green lawns brown and dry, the threat posed by illegal fireworks grows, fire and police officials say. Modesto fire Marshal Mike Payton and police Sgt. Kelly Rea from the Stanislaus County Fireworks Safety Task Force on Thursday stressed authorities’ reliance on public cooperation in helping stop the use of illegal fireworks.

“This is a dangerous year for all of us. ... It’s real easy to get a grass fire going,” Rea said at a news conference at the Modesto Police Department. The city has a zero-tolerance enforcement policy under which anyone caught with less than 25 pounds of illegal fireworks will be fined a minimum of $1,000.

Possession in greater amounts can result in stiffer penalties, the officials said. Under state law, those cited for illegal fireworks face fines of up to $50,000 and jail terms of up to a year. State law also holds parents liable for any fire damage or injury caused by their children using such fireworks.

But while the influx of illegal fireworks into the state, Stanislaus County and Modesto continues, Modesto Fire Department staffing has been reduced over the years, Payton said. Crews are busy every Fourth of July, he said, and people using illegal fireworks – anything that shoots into the air or explodes – are endangering the lives and property of themselves and others.

“We’ve actually taken 8-inch mortars away from people, which is big even for a professional display,” he said.

From July 2-5, four to seven officers with the fireworks task force will be on patrol in Modesto in marked and unmarked vehicles, Rea said. But he emphasized that the officers need residents to be their eyes and ears.

“If you guys see these (illegal fireworks), call, don’t just let them go off and say, ‘That’s my neighbor letting fireworks go off and they do it every year.’ We have a task force that will come out and we will send out unmarked cars into the neighborhood and we will park down the street and we’ll wait till someone launches and we’ll go arrest ’em. So, yeah, we need the public’s help. ... If you don’t call and we’re all in the southeast or the northeast part of town and you have fireworks going off by the mall and no one’s calling, well, we can’t see that far and we don’t deploy our resources there.”

The number to call is the nonemergency dispatch line, (209) 552-3911.

A major source of illegal fireworks transactions is the classified advertising website Craigslist, officials said. At Thursday’s news conference, they distributed a printout of nine advertisements for illegal fireworks available in the Modesto and Stockton areas. Products offered include bottle rockets, firecrackers, “200 gram aerial repeaters” and “60 gram canister shells.”

One seller, who goes by the name Scuba, is operating within half a dozen jurisdictions in the Valley and Bay Area, said Dennis Revell, a spokesman for legal fireworks giant TNT who works with the county task force. Like most sellers, he said, Scuba hasn’t been caught because police and fire agencies don’t have the resources to conduct sting operations. Payton and Modesto police spokeswoman Heather Graves agreed that’s the situation.

Revell and local authorities pointed out a Craigslist policy that specifically prohibits the sale of fireworks and explosives on the site, but said Craigslist is not adequately policing its content.

A lot of illegal fireworks sales happen simply through word of mouth, Payton said. “A lot of people are selling them out of their garage,” using people they know to sell to others.

A challenge of fighting illegal fireworks is that authorities face everything from “single criminal entrepreneurs” to shipments big enough to fill the Police Department public meeting room from floor to ceiling, Revell said. Sometimes those shipments are bound for states where they’re legal but end up in California, he said.

That difference in legality among states sometimes means that “people who’ve recently moved to the state truly don’t know they’re illegal here,” Payton said. But that ignorance of the law is no excuse, he said, and certainly doesn’t get someone off the hook of the mandatory $1,000 fine.

Over 10 or 11 years, Modesto officials have issued about 308 citations, the marshal said. There have been no arrests for possession of more than 25 pounds of illegal material, he said.

The marshal could not give a figure on how many fires are caused by illegal fireworks because the July Fourth holiday period is a busy time for fire crews, who are focused on extinguishing fires and not pinpointing the cause. But as an indication, Revell provided figures from Los Angeles County showing that since 2008, 96 percent to 100 percent of fireworks-related damage was caused by illegal fireworks.

The Fire Department will accept – no questions asked, no penalties – illegal fireworks from anyone who wants to turn them in, Payton said. They can be dropped at Stations 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9.

Do people ever do so? Not often, but it happens, Payton said, “like when a son goes away to college and Mom finds them at the bottom of his bedroom closet and says, ‘Oh, my.’”

This story was originally published June 25, 2015 at 2:34 PM with the headline "Modesto officials continue ‘zero tolerance’ of illegal fireworks."