It takes days of planning, a highly sophisticated computer system and thousands of rockets, Catherine wheels and candles to prepare a public fireworks display – and it’s all over in a flash.
Organised fireworks displays are, for many, people the highlight of Bonfire Night.
Each year Dundee City Council organises two displays – one at Baxter Park and the other at Lochee Park.
The man in charge of this year’s event is Adam Hillary, display director with Country Durham-based company Reaction Fireworks, and The Courier caught up with him as the finishing touches were being put to this year’s display in Lochee.
He said: “We are using 11,500 fireworks this year. It takes about two days to come up with the display and then another with a team of five people to set it up.
“The important thing is the music – once we get that we can get the fireworks set up to go off in time with music.”
The theme at this year’s two displays in Dundee is superheroes, which will allow for a suitably bombastic music and explosions in the sky but Adam said they also have fireworks for softer pieces of music.
Fireworks today have electrical fuses so they can be programmed to go off in advance with a timer.
This allows for incredibly exact displays although it can go badly wrong – as organisers in Oban discovered three years ago.
“It’s all computerised. Each firework has a separate address and so the computer knows when to let if off – it works kind of like a series of light switches,” said Adam.
“There is a timer and in Oban they had set it for tenths of a second rather than seconds, so what should have lasted 30 minutes lasted 30 seconds,” he added.
Adam was also responsible for the display to mark the unveiling of the memorial to victims of the Tay Bridge Disaster last year, an event he said posed a particular challenge.
“We had to fire the fireworks from a barge that had been specially built and the water was pretty choppy,” he said.