Flashpoint, the way I teach my safety trainees, is the lowest ambient temperature necessary for a substance to give off enough vapors to become ignitable. In other words, the temperature needed for it to catch fire!
It’s also the location on my body where it all started…
You know, it’s hard to believe that next year will mark 50 years since this happened, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.
East Chicago, July 4, 1976
We were enjoying the Fourth of July celebration as we usually do: a full day of barbecuing, fun, and dancing that went on throughout the park across the street, through my block, and along the city streets in all directions.
Just about everyone participated. The music was loud, coming at you in soul, salsa, disco, and some hard rock. Nobody complained, you just locked on to whatever genre suited you and danced accordingly.
Throughout this time, you would catch the occasional splatter of packs or bricks of firecrackers detonated somewhere near. Once in a while, the underwear-filling “BOOM” of an M-80 explosive would go off, making you think a cannon was fired from across the street.
But the real fun began with the setting sun, when bright lights and colors were center stage, when bright lights and colors WERE the stage. Whether or not you drove down to our arch rival, Roosevelt High School, for the all-day festival and fireworks display, the block was still filled with enough residents to keep the party jumping. And it was this year that we remained on Alder Street.
It seemed that everyone was home that evening because if they weren’t in the street, they were on the sidewalk, seated in lawn chairs on their lawn, or sitting on their porches. Music was everywhere and flashes or multi-colored illegal fireworks went off all around and above as the people below waved their arms to create the golden light trail from the Sparklers.
From time to time, you had to keep an eye out for the occasional idiots who, instead of planting them on the ground, chose to hold the Roman Candles in their hands and aim them at people, who ran away laughing or screaming in terror.
My favorites were the Jumping Jacks. Shaped just like Firecrackers, but behaving much differently. Instead of exploding once the ignited fuse met the mortar’s cap, these things erupted from a hole in the side, causing them to spin, dance, and bounce uncontrollably. If you lit a whole pack at once, you knew to run for your life.
Which I should have done that evening.
Midway down the block, one of our neighbors had a seemingly endless stash of Bottle Rockets and Jumping Jacks, which he enjoyed lighting in groups at a time. So you know where my 8-year-old attention was. Having seen me dancing around the firecrackers (kids, don’t do that at home – in fact, don’t do that at ALL, anywhere – EVER), he waited until I walked over to his yard before lighting the next set.
Despite the heat, my mother insisted that I wear my hoodie as protection against stray fireworks, but had she any idea what I would actually be doing, I’m sure she would have made me watch from inside my living room window.
Looking back, I wish she had…
My neighbor lit one brick package of Jacks and threw them onto the sidewalk. The moment they activated, I, like some of the other kids, ran in the middle, dancing around. When the next set went off, so did I.
I think it was somewhere around the 7th or 8th pack that I started to dance to some nearby music when one of the Jumping Jacks bounced to the side of me, then in front of me, then right at me as I jumped backwards.
Somehow, I tripped while moving backwards, just as another one landed right at my belt buckle, disappearing under and into my hoodie. Instantly, I jumped back up, screaming as I swatted at my stomach, frantically trying to knock the fiery, buzzing, object out as it burned against my tender flesh.
Howling in pain, I ran down the street to my house through the other fireworks as people pointed. Some even laughed, unaware that my skin beneath my navel had been barbecued, which would have been visible through the hole at the bottom of my hoodie, had I stopped to show it.
It was the last time I danced or did anything else near fireworks.
From that night (where I spent a good hour, crying in the bathtub as my mother gave me first aid treatment, knowing they should have taken me to the hospital) until this very day, I exercise extreme caution when using fireworks around the neighborhood kids…
…IF I’m the one igniting them at all.
And no, it’s not the reason that I started and spent my career as a Safety professional. It’s purely coincidental.
But it doesn’t mean that when I gave training on carelessness and horseplay, that I didn’t look back on, and oftentimes reference, that embarrassingly painful evening.
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And oh yes, be safe during the holiday.
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