The number of cars and homes catching fire during this year’s New Year festivities has far outstripped last year’s figures, according to the public safety institute NIPV. This year the emergency services were called out to 361 car and 228 home fires, compared with 270 and 144 respectively in 2025. The national fire brigade said on Thursday it had been a busier year, with 4,286 call-outs in total. The emergency services were prepared for a difficult evening, given this was...
I’d say both. In big cities, it’s a problem of insufficient policing of antisocial vandalism, in places where there still is a remainder of societal cohesion and social control, the problem is more caused by different fireworks technology.
Not too long ago, battery fireworks that fire dozens of shots once lit up weren’t a thing. There were firecrackers and rockets, which you had to light individually, and therefore the potential for accidents was smaller, since you might accidentally throw a single firecracker where it doesn’t belong or launch a single rocket anywhere else but straight up by accident, but if a battery falls over while it’s still going, it’ll be dozens of shots going places where they have no business landing, with no way to stop it. On top of that, spent batteries will often catch fire about an hour or two after they were fired, due to the large amount of cardboard they consist of being a relatively good insulator and lots of heat accumulating from the many shots they fire.
Of course, idiots blowing themselves up by illegally getting or even building fireworks way bigger than they can handle, also are (and were) a thing. But an idiot who blows up his hand with fireworks this year will have one hand less to do stupid fireworks shit with next year.
Is this more of a vandalism problem than a firework problem?
I’d say both. In big cities, it’s a problem of insufficient policing of antisocial vandalism, in places where there still is a remainder of societal cohesion and social control, the problem is more caused by different fireworks technology.
Not too long ago, battery fireworks that fire dozens of shots once lit up weren’t a thing. There were firecrackers and rockets, which you had to light individually, and therefore the potential for accidents was smaller, since you might accidentally throw a single firecracker where it doesn’t belong or launch a single rocket anywhere else but straight up by accident, but if a battery falls over while it’s still going, it’ll be dozens of shots going places where they have no business landing, with no way to stop it. On top of that, spent batteries will often catch fire about an hour or two after they were fired, due to the large amount of cardboard they consist of being a relatively good insulator and lots of heat accumulating from the many shots they fire.
Of course, idiots blowing themselves up by illegally getting or even building fireworks way bigger than they can handle, also are (and were) a thing. But an idiot who blows up his hand with fireworks this year will have one hand less to do stupid fireworks shit with next year.
Isn’t giving people access to explosives without any sort of background check still worsening the problem?