OPINION> Commentary
Make fireworks safe
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-01 07:41

They are pretty. They are festive.

They augment joys at moments of celebration, as we saw at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

But they are dangerous as well.

At 10:13, Saturday morning, an explosion left 13 dead and six injured at a fireworks factory in Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

This is only a tragic update of a very long list of accidents associated with fireworks. In each of the recent past years, we heard sad news like this, from different parts of the country. We heard of accidents in making, transporting, and shooting of fireworks.

Still we love fireworks.

For the joyous mood they bring to us. For the unparalleled mix of real and surreal they present. And, of course, for our very special sentimental attachment to it - our ancestors invented powder, which made all the illusory scenes in the sky possible.

Safety concerns once prompted many municipal authorities in the country to impose bans on fireworks. But quite some of them have ended up being porous, or simply abortive. The city of Beijing, for example, lifted a categorical ban last year after finding it to be a mission impossible. The reason? People are not ready for Spring Festivals without the bang of firecrackers.

And we need fireworks, for more practical reasons.

As a major traditional export, they earn big money. In this country, it is a 15-billion-yuan industry providing jobs for around 1 million people, in thousands of factories. More than 80 percent of the world's supply of fireworks is from China. Which means the world's night skies will become more or less cheerless, if not dull, if we stop making fireworks.

The challenge then is to make sure the industry produces no more tragedies. The sad news from Inner Mongolia was a lamentable footnote of such a need.

Nineteen years ago, the fireworks industry set up its own institution to promote and oversee standardization. At national and local levels, compulsory rules on standards and procedures have been enacted to ensure safety control.

There even are separate documents stipulating specific technological details in the design of fireworks factories, and factory operation procedures, respectively.

If everything goes in accordance with what we have on paper, we should not have heard so much bad news at fireworks producing venues.

Yet the same old pattern continues. In most cases, the culprit turned out to be neglect.

We are yet to know exactly what went wrong to cause the Inner Mongolia tragedy.

We hope it is not, again, carelessness. We have paid too much for that.

If the current rules cannot guarantee proper awareness, it is time for a reshuffle.

We cannot afford more bloody stories from fireworks factories.

Their only product should be joy.

(China Daily 09/01/2008 page4)