Editorial: Let's just call it bad luck

For a while, the only debate about a fireworks show here was all about divorcing the Chamber of Commerce’s pyrotechnic display from the fixed holiday, the Fourth of July, the day that Congress approved the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Congress actually declared independence on July 2, by the way, and John Adams thought that day would be the big one for celebrating for centuries to come — but that’s another topic.

By now, people have gotten used to the idea that Shelter Island’s fireworks show takes place a week or two after the July 4 weekend holiday. Initially, the reason for the delay was to allow the last piping plover fledglings across the channel to leave their nests. More recently, it has become accepted wisdom that blasting off the fireworks later gives Shelter Island businesses an extra holiday weekend to bolster their bottom lines. And that has seemed to be fine with everybody.

The failure of the show to go off last weekend has reopened the scheduling debate. Should the Chamber scramble to put on a fireworks show  on another weekend this summer? Should the fireworks be shot off on Labor Day weekend or another time in September? And if there is a show late this summer or fall, should it become a tradition that replaces the July fireworks? If not, won’t a late show this year spoil some of the spark of the July fireworks next year?

And is there even time to do it this year? The permit process would have to be followed all over again.

It’s a shame the show didn’t happen last weekend. It hit some people pretty hard, especially some of the smaller ones on the beach Saturday night. There were some tears out there. For a kid, little or big, what’s summer on Shelter Island without fireworks at Crescent Beach?

No Islander is to blame for the very bad luck of Bay Firework’s technical problem Saturday or the wide carpet of thunderstorms that rolled through on Sunday, the rain date. The Chamber of Commerce did a great job preparing for the show and raising the funds to put it on. Maybe the process of notifying beachgoers and the public that the show had been canceled could be improved — but it wasn’t a bad process, considering the fact that it was figured out on the fly. Most people got the word pretty quickly. Any quicker and the roads would have been even more clogged than they were.

Summer is a very busy time for most Islanders. Trying to pull off a fireworks show now, in the relatively few remaining warm weekends of the year — which all fall in hurricane season; remember Irene? — would be asking for trouble. Our luck has been bad enough. Let’s use our credit with Bay Fireworks to beat the odds and pull off a great show next July, at the time we’ve grown to accept as a good time.

Mostly because of liability worries, many places in the country stopped their firework shows altogether decades ago. For us, things aren’t that bad: we just have to wait a year.