How Indiana led the way in legalizing backyard fireworks despite safety concerns

Fireworks lovers and haters had at least one viewpoint in common before the turn of the millennium in Indiana: The state's confusing, loophole-ridden fireworks law was a joke.

It was illegal for private citizens to shoot off fireworks into the air. But you could buy them from a store in Indiana, as long as you signed a form promising that you would take them out of state within five days.

Some called it silly, some crazy. “It’s a sham,” proclaimed former state Rep. David Frizzell, R-Indianapolis, on Indiana's House floor in early 2006. "Let’s end it today.”

And that year, they did. The deal they struck ― after decades of lobbying and hundreds of thousands in political contributions by the fireworks industry, stymied for a long time by one particular state senator from Fort Wayne ― made Indiana one of the most liberal states in the country at the time with regard to fireworks. Everything that the feds consider legal, Hoosiers could shoot off on their own property, which is now the case in about half of U.S. states.

Today Indiana's law has another element that only one other state, Arizona, has: Local governments are explicitly prohibited from regulating fireworks use for 11 days around the Fourth of July and New Year's.

Fireworks facts and laws: What Hoosiers need to know

The law has a sweetener that gives it staying power: A fee tied to fireworks sales that pays for firefighter training. It was a deal that even the fire officials couldn't refuse.

Perhaps as a result of Indiana's lax laws, the state's fireworks industry is booming. Hoosiers spend more money setting off fireworks than 43 other states, according to a ValuePenguin analysis of 2022 import data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Fireworks stores and billboards dot the state's borders, especially with Illinois, where aerial firecrackers are banned.

Hundreds of people are injured each year, according to the most recent data available, but there's no telling how many more were injured during the pandemic-era doubling of sales because the state no longer collects this data.

Though a few state representatives from denser areas in central Indiana have tried to introduce legislation in recent years to give more power to local governments, Indiana, whose Statehouse overwhelmingly represents rural interests, appears entrenched in boom-town for the foreseeable future.

"They’re here," said Dale Henson, executive director of the Indiana Fire Chiefs Association, "and they’re here to stay."

The fireworks industry gets organized

That "silly" fireworks law of the late 20th century stemmed from a raid of a longtime Muncie fireworks wholesaler in 1983 ― a climax of sorts to years of contention between industry dealers and state fire officials over the state's vague laws.

Explosive, aerial fireworks were illegal for private use in Indiana. So North Central Industries in Muncie was selling them wholesale to clients in states where they were legal, like Tennessee. In what the papers then described as an attempt to "test" the laws on the books, state police and fire officials at the start of fireworks season attempted to seize $300,000 worth of product and arrested 28 employees.

The distributor sued, earning a settlement amount reported to be a quarter of a million dollars. The parties reached an agreement that those who purchase illegal fireworks from North Central Industries would sign a statement saying they'd take them out of state. The General Assembly then adopted that language into state law in 1985.

But since it was impractical to enforce, the law allowed a lucrative black market of illegal fireworks to flourish in Indiana, to the chagrin of both industry folk and fire officials. Almost everyone agreed the law needed to change.

Naturally, they didn't agree on how.

The industry wanted to legalize everything. From their perspective, it was well known that Hoosiers were buying fireworks from Tennessee and blowing them up here, anyway.

"Other states were making all the profit; I pay taxes here but can’t profit even though they’re shooting them here," said Richard Shields, owner of North Central Industries who took over from his father in the mid 1990s.

A sizeable contingent of fire chiefs was adamantly against this. They'd seen the permanence of fireworks-related injuries ― fingers blown off, eyes permanently damaged. Why not leave it to the professionals?

"When I took the oath for the job, my oath was protect lives and property," said Fred Hines, a former Seymour fire chief who had taken the industry to court multiple times. "And how could you possibly say, 'Hey it’s alright to shoot fireworks?'"

By the time the raid happened, the fireworks industry was already getting organized. They formed the Indiana Fire Distributors Association in 1975. In the late '80s, Shields met John Brooke, a departing Delaware County deputy prosecutor who was starting his own private practice in Muncie.

"I saw an opportunity really to do some good and to create a niche practice," Brooke said. "I didn’t want to do divorces all my life."

Whenever a fire marshal somewhere was trying to shut down a retail stand, Shields recommended Brooke, until through word of mouth, he became the country's preeminent fireworks lawyer, with clients in 48 states and 22 countries. The distributors association managed to pull in 90% of the state's retailers, Shields estimates, because Brooke would only represent them if they became members.

They got to work on changing the law.

Fireworks lobby v. one state senator

They hired lobbyists. They started a political action committee called Safe PAC, which is not an acronym. ("We had to be creative," Brooke said.) In the decade leading up to the 2006 law, the Safe PAC would give more than half a million dollars to state political candidates, including $20,000 each to the gubernatorial candidates in 2004: Democrat Frank O'Bannon and Republican Mitch Daniels.

A separate PAC called Indiana Pyrotechnics Education PAC gave another quarter million to political candidates between 2000 and 2006.

Every year that a fireworks legalization bill was introduced, the industry butted heads with one senator: Sen. Thomas Wyss from Fort Wayne, then-chair of the Senate's influential public policy committee.

He was the senator who battled the alcohol industry for a decade to get a bill passed that would lower the drunk-driving threshold from 0.1% blood-alcohol content to 0.08%. One of his peers called him "Senator Safety." The fire chiefs were against these fireworks bills, so he listened to them. Wyss would always kill the bills sent to his committee by not giving them a hearing.

"I was always listening to the safety people on any of those issues," Wyss said recently.

Then Brooke, the fireworks lawyer, came up with a deal clincher. He had done enough work with municipal law to know that governments were always looking for another source of revenue that didn't mean raising taxes. So how about a 5% "public safety fee" on fireworks sales that generate $2 million to $4 million a year for firefighter training and disaster response programs?

"It silenced our critics," Brooke said. "They bit their tongues. The fire chiefs association's tongues were bit so much they were bleeding, but they wouldn't oppose it because they're going to get the benefit of the money."

Once then-governor Daniels was behind it, the stage was set. A bill got introduced and shipped to a different committee, not Wyss's.

The new law would also require hospitals and trauma centers to report fireworks-related injuries annually to the state Department of Health.

"They had more money than us; they pretty much beat us like a drum," Hines, who was part of the fire chiefs association at the time, said of the fireworks lobby. "In my personal opinion, the fire service sold out."

The modern battles

These days, the fireworks debate isn't so much about whether we should have them. That cat's out of the bag. It's about how much control local governments should have to further restrict those allowable times.

Many remember the first year the law changed as mayhem. Aerial fireworks became legal from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. year round or until midnight on holidays. People were celebrating newfound freedom, some said; others compared the scene to the sounds of Baghdad, remembers Steven Graves, executive director of the Indiana Fireworks Distributors Association.

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The following year, lawmakers amended the language to allow locals to further restrict those time periods. But not on Jan. 1 or July 4 ― or the 10 days before and after.

Every year since 2017, retiring state Rep. Donna Schaibley has introduced a bill to chip away at those 11 days. In a 2022 bill hearing, she described Carmel being inundated with booms and explosions during that time period, with local police powerless to clamp down. She acknowledged, too, that this is largely an urban concern.

"I think the communities where these people live should have some kind of say-so," Schaibley said. "Frankly, I think most of the communities in the state of Indiana, they’re not going to do anything."

Military veterans advocates testified about the plight of those with post-traumatic stress disorder, for whom the boom of fireworks can be triggering. Then-city councilor Sue Finkam said she gets calls every year from residents concerned about veterans and needing to sedate their dogs.

"All we’re asking for is the power to have a local conversation with our community," said Finkam, who is now the mayor of Carmel.

But for the most part, lawmakers ignored these arguments. The bills never get past the committee stage. The fireworks industry argues that a patchwork system of local laws would be nearly impossible to enforce; the fire chiefs association has remained neutral.

That's because the association simply isn't hearing complaints about fireworks laws from its members these days, said legislative chair Steve Orusa, also the Fishers fire chief.

"It hasn’t been on our radar as of late," he said. They have bigger fish to fry, like solving the crisis of emergency-services deserts in rural Indiana.

To boot, they no longer have statewide data to drive concerns: In 2018, lawmakers repealed the part of the law requiring fireworks-related injury reporting, despite injuries trending upward.

Even before the repeal, the injury report's authors emphasized how unreliable the data was since the reporting law "was not actively enforced" and not every report submitted was complete or accurate. So while the department reported an average of 175 injuries a year, it cautioned that this was likely an underestimate. Close to half of these injuries were among children.

Nationally, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported an estimated 10,200 firework injuries in 2022.

"For me, if there’s only two of 'em, that’s too many," said Hines, who is a founding member of the Hoosier Burn Camp, a summer camp for children who've suffered severe burns. "If only two kids in Indiana lose their thumbs, that’s two too many."

Notably, the number of Indiana fireworks injuries dropped to their lowest in 2012, when a majority of counties issued some form of a fireworks ban due to a drought. Still, other evidence suggests that that fireworks laws are less important than safety education in combatting bone-headed human behavior. The numbers reported before the legalization of explosive fireworks were even higher.

State fire marshal Steve Jones is far more concerned with the education piece than changing the law, which he says is "bigger than me."

"Everybody's got an opinion," he said. "I don't think if you made it more stricter, that it would change the outcome of people's using it.

"I don't think any organization is set up to monitor 6.8 million Hoosiers," he added. "A lot of it's just respecting your neighbor."

He sees the fireworks fee revenue as a "double-edged sword," but not in the same way the fire chiefs did in 2006. The money goes to the state disaster relief fund and a state firefighter training fund, which is in charge of certifying all the training that happens in Indiana and supplies grants to local departments. But it's an inconsistent source of money that varies from year to year ― it rarely gets above $3 million a year, apart from the COVID-19 years, when Hoosiers doubled their fireworks purchases.

It's hard to gauge public sentiment about the state of things other than anecdotally. That there have been new laws proposed means Carmel legislators have gotten phone calls from constituents ― but even those have trickled off for Republican state Rep. Jerry Torr, who coauthored Schaibley's bills the last three years. He estimates he's gotten maybe a dozen calls or emails in a single year. And it's not an issue rural representatives hear much about.

"I think most people are going to think, if they’re annoyed by it, 'Oh my neighbors are inconsiderate and gee I wish they’d stop doing that,'" Torr said. "But some people have the mindset, 'Oh there needs to be a law.' Which is where most of the legislation comes from, quite frankly."

Graves, of the fireworks association, said if consumers want fireworks, then the job of industry and regulators is to make it as safe as possible and promote respect.

"There’s always some dingdong, some careless, unthoughtful person out there who shoots off these fireworks every night. And I’m sorry for that," he said. "But the vast vast majority of consumers are respectful.

"Don’t make this be a nuisance," he said. "It’s supposed to be fun."

For his part, Wyss, who is now 81, isn't trying to rain on fun. He loves the Fourth of July and enjoys watching fireworks ― those that are set off by professionals.

"It’s about celebrating our freedoms," he said. "But safely."

Contact IndyStar state government and politics reporter Kayla Dwyer at [email protected] or follow her on X:@kayla_dwyer17

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: How Indiana led in legalizing fireworks despite safety concerns