MILLINOCKET, Maine — Fireworks will be banned from use within town limits effective Dec. 23 under an ordinance town leaders approved earlier this week.
With Councilor Louis Pelletier opposing, the Town Council voted 6-1 on Monday to enforce the ban. A half-dozen people spoke in favor of the ordinance. Resident Al Madore argued the ban would relieve the suffering of people in the community with post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly veterans.
“I love fireworks,” Madore said during the meeting. “I enjoy watching them, but there has to be a place for them. Unless we can come up with a specific place that we could fire them, I am definitely for the ban.”
Pelletier said he sympathized with PTSD sufferers but questioned the ban’s necessity. He felt the large number of fireworks users in town would make the ordinance difficult to enforce.
“It is a ban, an outright ban, and I think that’s an overreaction where history doesn’t prove the safety statistics that it is an issue, safety wise,” Pelletier said. “It is like a death penalty being imposed. We will still have murderers.”
Millinocket’s ban comes with a fine of up to $500 for its violation, Councilor Michael Madore said. It will not prevent licensed professional displays.
During the ordinance’s first public hearing in October, Councilor Madore and Public Safety Director Steve Kenyon recommended the ban because many residents were behaving irresponsibly, shooting fireworks off moving vehicles, into neighbors yards or at all hours. They worried about fires. Most Millinocket housing lots, they said, are too narrow for safe fireworks usage.
Resident Carl Akeley called fireworks “an accident waiting to happen.”
“I wish it wasn’t,” Akeley said. “I happen to love fireworks myself, but I just don’t think that most people who are firing them know what they are doing.”
The law legalizing fireworks in Maine went into effect in January 2012. Maine law allows anyone 21 and older to buy, sell, possess or use fireworks. Legal fireworks include those certified by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, such as certain firecrackers, morning glories, Roman candles and flaming fountains. They do not include missile-type rockets, helicopters and aerial spinners, sky rockets, bottle rockets or cherry bombs.
The ordinance will go into effect 30 days from the council’s vote.