Fire officials keen to see fewer bangs over holiday
Print Edition
ABOUT 18,000 boxes of illegal fireworks have been confiscated since December, the Shanghai Fire Control Bureau said yesterday.
Local authorities have been trying to restrict the sale of fireworks on the approach to the Spring Festival holiday out of environmental concerns and a desire to reduce accidents.
The move has sparked debate between those who say the lighting of fireworks is a longstanding Chinese tradition and those who claim they are a fire hazard and cause air pollution.
According to the fire control bureau, about 400 fires and 20 personal injuries a year are attributed to fireworks, of which 90 percent occur during the Chinese New Year holiday.
The bureau said it seizes about 30,000 to 40,000 boxes of fireworks annually.
Shanghai firefighters received 124 reports of fires on Chinese New Year’s Eve last year.
According to the environmental monitoring administration, in a period of just six hours spanning Chinese New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in 2013, the concentration of PM2.5 pollutants in the air increased more than sixfold to 523.7 micrograms per cubic meter due to the high volume of fireworks being lit.
Last year, the fire control bureau imposed a limit of 300,000 on the number of boxes of fireworks that could be sold in the city and reduced the number of licensed vendors to 1,314.
Those figures have this year been further cut to 150,000 boxes and 650 sellers.
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