By Bruce Karnick

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America, we love blowing stuff up. We love the kabooms, the bangs, the pops. We love the ooohs and the aaahhhs as brightly colored particles light the sky. We LOVE fireworks. We know they are not created by magic, even if they seem like they are, but how do modern fireworks shows happen?

Pyrotechnics Technicians work long, tiring days to bring us anywhere from six to 30 minutes of joy. Yes, there are multiple jokes in there, so try not to giggle too hard… But seriously. These magicians often start their days at 5:00 a.m. building, stuffing, packing, carrying, wiring, cleaning, carrying more and ultimately performing for us to get home and to bed at 2:00 am to start it all over again the next day. If they are lucky, they can get their show set up quick enough to catch a few hour nap before setting the show off.

Just like every other industry after COVID, the pyrotechnics industry is faced with a shortage of help, so schedules had to be rearranged for many towns in Minnesota, Hastings included. We went out to the Hastings Golf Club to get a sneak peak at the setup during the day and Lead Technician Keith Kutzke gave us the rundown. This is one of those things that your inner child should be jealous of if you like ‘science-y” and ‘geeky’ things.

With the shortage, what does it take for a technician to be certified?

“You’ve got to be underneath a professional business doing fireworks for five shows and then you’ve got to go in and take a test, a two-part test to get your certification,” the 54-year veteran Kutzke explained.

Yes, he has been doing fireworks shows for over 50 years. But how many shows does that equal a year? He runs one to two shows a week from June to September then things slow down, but he still gets fireworks work year-round. They do graduations, football games, homecomings, and a lot of weddings.

Kutzke then started going over the sizes of the fireworks in the racks they setup. The smallest tube was 2.5 inches and the largest was eight inches. The height of the fireworks ranges from 200 to 800 feet, so if you are thinking you can safely fly your drone over the fireworks, think again.

“We’ve never taken one down yet,” laughed Kutzke, that does not mean he wants too though.

For the 22-minute show scheduled for Hastings, they arrived at 7:00 to start the building process. Each rack is labeled, and tubes are put in place, then the tubes packed with the mortar shells and finally the wires are run. A process that takes most of the day to complete. But that is only half of the planning. Someone must plan the show, order the shells, write the script and set the stage up for the techs to build.

The days of hand lighting are over for most places. Most use a control board with either a 12-volt or 24-volt battery hooked up as the ignition source. “a nine volt will light most of these easily, it don’t take much to light them,” added Kutzke.

The control board is a set of knobs A-Z plus 36 individual switches. A is the first ‘scene’ of 36 switches, B is the next 36 and so on. For Kutzke, there is an added piece of equipment, an MP3 player. The MP3 player has a recording that counts down for when to throw each switch and turn each knob. Some shows, like ones that are part of large musical shows, are all computerized.

With the Hastings show, they used up to L for the knobs, that means 12 different scenes of 36 fireworks. The thing is, not all 36 are single shots. Many were multiple shots that either fired simultaneously, or a brick pack of 20-40 smaller shells.

Kutzke spent a good 20 minutes giving us the rundown of how things worked, it was a very cool experience to see the behind the scenes of a fireworks show and we thank him for giving us such an amazing tour. That time spent taught a different level of appreciation for the show that took place later that evening.

Special thank you to Vermillion Bank for their major sponsorship of the Fourth of July Fireworks in Hastings along with the Hastings Golf Club for hosting.

Lead Technician Keith Kutzke leads us through a tour of the fireworks racks at the Hastings Golf Club. The racks stand about three feet tall and hold up to an eight inch tube.Photo by Bruce Karnick