Adrian Nacey: Fire and Emergency NZ Community Safety Manager on the call to ban public fireworks sales

A Fire and Emergency manager believes public fireworks sales should be banned as Guy Fawkes looms. 

It's currently restricted to just four days a year, this year from November 2nd until Guy Fawkes. 

It's one of the busiest periods of the year for firefighters, who had about 20 fireworks-related callouts in the 48 hours since sales began. 

Community Safety Manager Adrian Nacey told Andrew Dickens they get between 150 and 200 fireworks related calls each year, and they’re not all necessarily caused by recklessness. 

He says little things like wind can cause issues, so they’d prefer fireworks were kept in the hands of professionals. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's November the fifth, and we all know what that means.
We know it in New Zealand it's sky Fork's Day,
and it also means more debate about banning the things. Now,
Winston Peters has submitted a member's bill which would ban
the importing and sale of fireworks, and Fire and Emergency
had preemptively closed access to fourteen mountains around Auckland to

(00:21):
prevent wildfire. So we joined now with by the Fire
and Emergency. New Zealand Regulatory Compliance Manager Adrian Nacy has
got up early, but I guess you always get up early,
don't you.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Adrian, good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
What do you think should we ban them?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Well, Fire an Emergency, as you can imagine, would be
supportive of any changes to legislation that would reduce to
have from unwonted fire. That's what we're all about. So yeah,
we would be we'd be very pleased to see some
change to bring further restrictions just on the sale of
retail fireworks to the public.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
So you don't mind with the big displays, but you
don't want, you know, Joe Blow having fireworks in their backyard.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, that's great for us. The fireworks, we would just
prefer to be kept in the hands of the professionals.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
All right, So if this happens, is there a worry
that we ban them? But people go, yikes, they're banning them,
so they stockpile and they end out using out of
date fireworks.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, we don't really want people to stockpile fireworks for
a couple of reasons. We don't want them to be
set off over the summer when it gets even hotter,
warmer and dry than it is now. And it's also
not a good idea to have fireworks obviously stored in
your home and that can present a risk to our
firefighters if you had something go wrong in your property
and they weren't aware that there were fire fireworks stored there.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Now there's a number of people who say, I'm absolutely
responsible when it comes to fireworks, But that's not the problem.
The problem are the idiots. I mean, how bad are
the idiots?

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yes, we get between sort of one hundred and fifty
and two hundred fireworks related calls just that we go
to each year. It's not necessarily people being particularly reckless
all the time, as things like setting the fireworks off
when it's windy, auto close to things that can catch fire.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
So they're still legal today. So what are the restrictions
on letting off fireworks around the country.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
So the main thing for us around the restrictions is
you can only set them off in places we have
the landowners permission. So most councils around the country have
put restrictions on letting fireworks off in places like beaches
and parks. Obviously, Department of Conservation land is a no
go for setting off fireworks, and the main restrictions around

(02:32):
that is that you need the landowners permission. But the
main thing for us is obviously checking those weather conditions.
As you've seen around the last couple of weeks, it
has been hot, dry and windy around parts of the country.
This makes it really easy for fires to take control
and spread and get difficult for us to put out.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Adrian, I hope you have a really quiet night tonight,
and I thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
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