At heart of Boston's 4th, a team
Loading barges with fireworks caps long effort
In the Charles River, beyond the midday sunbathers, obscured from view by a slender island of trees, floats a network of sand-covered, metal barges filled with 16,000 pounds of explosives.
"Welcome to the steel beach," said Eric Tucker, the pyrotechnic director for Boston's July Fourth fireworks show. "Just watch any battery devices, and don't put your head over a loaded mortar."
Here, hundreds of feet from the shore, a team of 10 hurries about, packing fireworks into tubes - gun barrels, they call them - and sealing them as they race to meet tomorrow's deadline.
Tucker's team has put months of work into what they hope will evoke 23 minutes of oohs and ahhs as explosions light the sky.
Pyro Spectaculars, the company Tucker works for, has done the show for seven years now; so has Tucker. In the world of fireworks - and, yes, one exists - that is quite an honor.
"The Boston Fourth is kind of the crown jewel; all our competitors want to do this show," he said. "There's been a lot of good work here over the years, pyrotechnically speaking."
To meet those great expectations, Tucker has to start early, as in right when the previous show ends. "We start having autopsy over what we did that night," Tucker said.
From there, a site is chosen, and a committee goes to work picking the music for the fire show. That's the hardest part, Tucker said. It's all downhill from there.
"I play the music, and I pretty much know what to do," Tucker said. Choreographing the show is a matter of translating the audible to the visible, an art form like any other.
"They don't just put fireworks in a tube, light it, and blow it up," said Steve MacDonald, spokesman for Boston 4 Productions, the group that organizes the overall event. "They're performance artists."
To get the right look, the right explosion, Tucker and his team have two options: They can design a burst of their own, or they can use something already developed. Either way, the search for the right manufacturer can take them anywhere from Chile to China, he said. "The specifics vary, depending on the country."
While Tucker fires off experimental explosives in foreign orchards and rice paddies, employees at Boston 4 track down the barges that will become his platform.
That is not without complications. "We always come up one barge short," MacDonald said. "This year it came down to, literally, the last day."
Though he wouldn't say how much money goes toward barge rental, MacDonald placed it in the five-figure range, once insurance and transportation are included. As for the entire show, he said, "it costs more than you think."
From the shore, the barges look more like a trash heap than the epicenter of the $3 million Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. The platforms, pulled tight together with ropes and cables, form a floating T.
Up close, the platforms become mazes of wooden crates. Tubes of all sizes rest in the crates. The larger ones, 10 and 12 inches in diameter, sit in piles of sand, buffers for the gun barrels.
For about four days, the crew works to load the shells, which vary in size and shape, into the barrels, connect them to an electronic system, and cover them with plastic and foil to protect them from inclement weather. Tucker pulled a pale yellow, onion-shaped explosive from one barrel. It was a bit smaller than the average person's head.
"That's a pretty light one," he said as he dropped it back in.
In order to take in the whole show, Tucker will watch from the waterfront. Some of his team, however, will stay on board, watching from steel boxes that anchor the base of the barge.
"Fire is falling everywhere, and it's noisy," MacDonald said. "It's absolutely out of control."
For now, though, it's wait and see. There are no rehearsals. There are no do-overs. "Within two minutes," he said, "I'll know if I'm right or wrong."
Is Tucker worried? "I was a little nervous my first year." 