BEHIND RED, WHITE & BOOM
Meet the Bravest who keep city safe Fire honcho is one ‘shell’ of fireworks inspector
FOR 18 YEARS, he’s been having a blast.
Every Fourth of July, Jim Lauer, chief inspector of the FDNY explosives unit, can be found at the same place: inside an East River command center overseeing every safety detail of one of America’s greatest firework extravaganzas.
As head of the FDNY explosives unit, there’s not much that Lauer, 70, hasn’t seen disappear in a boom of fire and smoke in his nearly two decades on the job.
He’s coordinated big-budget Hollywood explosions, inspected sky-high pyrotechnics on the stages of major concerts, and blasted deep into the city bedrock for subway tunnels and building foundations.
But nothing requires the attention to detail of the Macy’s July 4th fireworks show. It features as many as 50,000 live shells, dropping at a rate of 1,600 per minute, shooting off five barges in the East River all timed to match a musical crescendo broadcast live on TV.
“With the waters in these rivers, it’s very hard to hold the barges in one place,” Lauer told the Daily News.
Massive tugboats are used to keep the five steel barges anchored in the East River — four of them in the waters off Midtown and one near lower Manhattan.
Along with the tugboats, a raft of private party vessels and bigger cruise ships also jockey for space with the barges in the busy river.
“Sometimes we get people on the leisure crafts who fall overboard — you, know, just a bit too much to drink,” the chief said.
Scuba divers are on standby to jump to the rescue, he said.
On top of that, the barges are guarded by FDNY water rigs — in case the cascading fireworks release a flammable spark shower that creates an unexpected boom.
“We get a few flames here and there, usually my fire inspectors are able to put them out, but if it really gets going we have the firefighters on the water, too,” Lauer said.
Amid the tricky combination of many shifting elements, Lauer and his crew also have to be mindful of where the fireworks barges are in relation to the shore — and the cameras.
“Sometimes we get a call saying the cameras can’t catch the explosions in the frame,” the native New Yorker said. “So we have to nudge the barges closer, but at the same time, they can’t get within 1,000 feet of land.”
The down-to-earth detonator has had his share of high-pressure moments over the years — including the time a camera crew needed to blow up a bus outside the Peter Luger steakhouse in Brooklyn for the Denzel Washington movie, “The Siege.”
He and his team of fire inspectors also kept the city safe during multiple “Die Hard” shoots — including a scene in which Bruce Willis blew out a crystal shop in busy Midtown for “Die Hard with a Vengeance.”
But nothing requires the logistical effort of the Macy’s fireworks show, which involves multi-agen- cy planning among the FDNY, the NYPD and the Department of Transportation and others, Lauer said.
“We’ve been doing it for a long time now but there’s this guy Murphy, you know him, right? The law is Murphy likes to show up when you least expect him, so you have to be vigilant on everything,” Lauer said.
Lauer and his crew of fire inspectors - including Deputy Chief of Ex- plosives Joe Meyers and Deputy Chief Inspector Darryl Chalmers - labor for months to set up all the details. Their hands-on assessment begins when a truck, full of fireworks from California, crosses the George Washington Bridge about a week before the big show.
Accompanied by an FDNY engine company, it’s brought to a city pier, where the actual barges — already swept for underwater devices by NYPD scuba divers — wait to
get loaded up.
Fire inspectors go over each packet of fireworks shells — checking for bad powder, loose wiring, anything that would point to a dud.
On July 4, the inspectors are front and center on the barges as well — checking that technicians are properly loading shells and watching for explosives that have a bad burst.
“The way the show is run now, it’s so precise, if one of our inspec- tors notices that some of the 8-inch shells, for example, aren’t going high enough or have a lot of sparks, maybe they’ve got some bad powder or something, we can pull all the 8-inch ones out of rotation, and the whole show will just go on,” Lauer said.
FDNY fire inspectors are kept busy running from party to party all summer long —doing as many as 50 or 60 gigs during prime fireworks season.
But they also work year round to keep city firefighters and residents safe, said union head Israel Miranda, president of Local 2507, which represents the inspectors and EMS workers.
The roughly 340 fire prevention inspectors enforce all kinds of city codes and laws, he said.
That includes going over residential buildings to make sure all the fire prevention systems are in working order when firefighters need them — like properly set up standpipe and sprinkler systems.
It also means checking rooftops and fire escapes, going into subway tunnels and train stations, combing over city bridges — all to make sure the firefighting equipment smoke eaters rely on in an emergency is up to par.
There’s even a nightclub division — inspectors who are on the prowl for venues that don’t take the proper safety precautions, leading to tragedies like the Happy Land Club fire in 1990 in the Bronx that killed 87 people.
“The average New Yorker never sees the fire inspectors, and probably isn’t aware of the important work they’re doing, but just like EMS, they’re always there behind the scenes doing what they can to save lives and prevent disasters,” Miranda said, adding, “They also help us all have a little holiday fun.”