At least three people are dead and two dozen are injured after a New Year’s Eve fireworks explosion in a Honolulu residential neighborhood, officials said.
The explosion occurred at a house 3 miles west of Fort Shafter, the headquarters of U.S. Army Pacific. Videos posted to social media by neighbors show a rapid series of bursts creating a blinding light next to the house as fireworks erupted around the city just after midnight.
Honolulu police said the explosion occurred after someone lit an “aerial cake” — a combination of multiple aerial firework cartridges that resemble a sheet cake — that fell to the side and rocketed into crates of additional caches of pyrotechnics, then erupted outward. Organic material from people hit by the blast was found on windows across the street from the epicenter.
Two women were pronounced dead at the scene, and a third died later at the hospital, police said. Their identities have not yet been released.
“I’ve been in EMS for over 30 years and this is probably one of the worst calls I’ve ever been on as far as just the immense tragedy and amount of patients and severity of the injuries,” Dr. James Ireland, director of Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Services, said at an early morning news conference Wednesday.
Twenty-six people were taken to hospitals, many with significant burn injuries. Sunny Johnson, paramedic supervisor for Honolulu Emergency Medical Services, said at the early morning news conference — as fireworks continued to go off in the background — that it was unclear how many additional victims may have been injured and left before emergency services arrived.
At a subsequent news conference Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Josh Green, a physician, said it is “highly likely” that more people will die as their lungs are burned out due to the incident.
“This incident is a painful reminder of the danger posed by illegal fireworks, which put lives at risk, drain our first responder resources, and disrupt our communities,” Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said. “Year after year, a minority of individuals recklessly endanger us all. This is absurd and unacceptable.”
Aerial fireworks require a pyrotechnic permit under Hawaiian state law. However, only a small minority of attempts to prosecute those violating fireworks restrictions result in guilty verdicts or pleas, and they usually result in only minor fines, according to a Honolulu Civil Beat analysis.
New Year’s Eve fireworks have a long history in Hawaii, where they are a strong cultural tradition. For decades, lawmakers have struggled to quell the widespread use of them across the state. A multiagency task force was established in 2010 to curb illegal fireworks, which, in addition to injuring people and pets and damaging property, had become a strain on public safety agencies.
Dozens of people are injured every New Year’s Eve in fireworks-related incidents across the state, although the number decreased from a high of 112 in 2009 to 42 in 2019, according to a Hawaiian legislative report that year.
Five people were injured by fireworks during this year’s celebrations in four other incidents in Oahu, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.
While acknowledging the sensitivity of restricting fireworks given the cultural importance they have to some Hawaii residents, officials said the deadly incident underlined the inherent risk. They also expressed frustration that as emergency rescue workers worked at the scene overnight, people were still shooting off fireworks four houses down.
Green said he would push to make it a felony to set off heavy or cake-like fireworks, while cautioning that it was not possible to legislate the danger away.
“We’ll do all that we can, but it’s going to have to be we as people making that decision to not do it,” he said.
