Huge fines coming for Californians caught by drone with illegal fireworks
Huge fines coming for Californians caught by drone with illegal fireworks
California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations.
A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks. From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department’s special fireworks task force patrolled the streets with unmarked cars and drones, focusing on neighborhoods where they’ve had prior complaints. Task force officers and the drones took photos of the illegal activity, and within 30 days the property owner where the fireworks were used could receive a fine in the mail.
Nobody shot off fireworks here because of the grave situation in our country. Just an eerie hush over the city. We've lived here for 60 years and never seen anything like 2025.
I miss the days when the obnoxious fireworks were illegal in my state :sigh:
This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There’s no limit to how many fines you can be issued.
“If we see multiple fireworks being used at a single property, we can stack the violations based upon how many fireworks they're using,” SFD Fire Marshal Jason Lee told KCRA. “So, it could be thousands of dollars per location.”
Hell yeah. Keep me awake till 3 am with your constant "boom boom boom", that's gonna cost ya. The only thing that would make this story better is if after a certain threshold, they bring in armed Predator drones.
If I'm coming off a bit cranky, it's because I've barely slept in 4 days.
Have you called the police? They fucking suck, but even in legal states they still have city ordinances that don't allow lighting off fireworks all night long. I know in the last city I lived in that allowed them, you had to stop by 2230 and they typically enforced it on every day that wasn't the 4th of July. The city went on to eventually ban fireworks year-round except for NYE and a 2-week window around the 4th.
My point is, if your city doesn't have these types of ordinances, you should rally local support to get them implemented. I guarantee you there are tons of people who feel the same as you about assholes lighting off big booms at 1am.
But why did drone have illegal fireworks
Next year's move is to mount the illegal fireworks to your own drone and hunt theirs out of the sky.
This new series of Battlebots sounds pretty entertaining.
Might become surprisingly relevant as fireworks and other explosives could be used in an attack on ICE vehicles and infrastructure.
It's the fire department doing the monitoring for those in a state where drought and wildfires are huge concerns.
There was a drone (prop plane type, not quadcopter) flying over neighborhoods for a while on the 4th, wouldn't surprise me if it was from the city to catch people. This being in Ohio.
Like, i get it; first few 4th of julys after I turned 18 i bought fireworks too, and it was fun. At a certain point the novelty wore off and it was stupid and dangerous, and i was literally blowing hundreds of dollars for no real reason.