Illegal firework reports spike in Bendigo

Sergeant Rod Davis said reports of loud bangs, which residents often confused for gunshots, had risen to as many as one per week during the past month, with Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Australia Day peak times for illegal firework activity.

“There’s been a little bit of an increase, obviously with Australia Day celebrations and Christmas and New Year, there always seems to be a bit of an influx over that New Year period ,” he said.

“Our concern around it is with it being at this time of the year due to the high fire danger risk that it poses with those types of devices being let off, whether they might end up in grassland where there’s a higher risk of it starting a fire.”

It’s an experience with which Kennington resident Kerry Reid is all too familiar, having recently been woken up at 1am by the loud bangs, a situation he described as “really common”.

“It goes quiet for a while and then you’ll just hear it,” he said.

“Sometimes it even sounds like a shotgun going off.”

While fireworks are illegal throughout Victoria without a licence, Sergeant Davis said the devices usually made their way across the border after being purchased in parts of Australia where the laws are less strict.

“We know how this works – usually it’s someone calling through those states, someone’s going through there so they give an order and off they go,” he said.

The warning comes after a 27-year-old man was left with life-threatening injuries after a firework exploded near his face on Australia Day, west of Echuca.

“Obviously we’d like to point out that these are explosives,” Sergeant Davis said.

“I think recently there was a gentleman injured with a firework so they’re illegal for a reason, that’s why the people that do the displays on New Year’s Eve are fully licensed and trained and if they’re in the hands of children or people that are inexperienced they can cause significant injuries.”

The man in charge of Bendigo’s New Year’s Eve display is Peter Daley, whose training tells him just how dangerous explosives can be in the hands of those who lack the proper equipment and know-how.

“They’ve got no idea what they’re dealing with, a lot of the stuff that seems to be around the [black] market now is the industrial stuff and it’s not like the old milk bar stuff we used to buy in the shops 20 years ago,” he said.

“A lot of these fireworks need hardware to fire them so on their own they’re extremely dangerous, it’s only when we load them into the mortars and the additional hardware that they actually do what they’re meant to do.”

Mr Daley said the proliferation of illegal fireworks and the resulting serious injuries and deaths also had a knock-on affect for legitimate fireworks providers.

“It’s like anything that goes underground, it affects the genuine operators and puts a bad look over our industry,” he said.

“All my guys are trained, they go through years of training before I give them exposure to it, when these people get hold of it they don’t know what they’re doing and we know the consequences don’t we.”

But despite the dangers, Sergeant Davis said unless police caught perpetrators in the act, bringing them to justice could be an uphill battle.

“It’s obviously difficult unless you witness it right there and then, if it’s just a report and we don’t know where they’ve come from it’s very difficult,” he said.

“We can charge them with being in possession of them but we’ve got to catch them with them.”