Long Beach Peninsula does Fourth of July right

You have not experienced the Fourth of July until you’ve
hit the Long Beach Peninsula on the south coast.

It features more than 20 miles of uninterrupted beach
where people can park, set bonfires, and let loose with
thousands of dollars worth of the good fireworks.
Mortars, roman candles and rockets; they’re all OK to use
at the beach. It’s a fire zone all around you with each
person trying to out-do the guy next to him.

Bob Andrew is the mayor of Long Beach, the peninsula’s
largest town. “It is amazing to see 20 miles of beach that
seems to have fireworks all along it,” he said.

Those personal fireworks shows build to a crescendo
between 9:00 and 10:00 pm when the city fires off its $15-
$20,000 display.

And then the beach turns into a free-for-all.

But what’s left is thousands of dollars worth of cardboard
tubes and paper packaging. What makes this Fourth of July
event special is the army of volunteers that meet at the
beach with garbage bags and gloves on July 5th. By noon,
there’s very little left of what happened 12 hours
earlier.

Mayor Andrew says the clean-up effort is what makes this
event profitable and a big economic boost for the
peninsula. The city doesn’t have to pay for a lot of the
cleanup.

“If it was all from the different governing agencies,
you’d probably be looking at, I hate to even estimate,
probably $40-$50,000,” he said.

By now the peninsula has set out large dumpsters at each
of the beach entrances so people can throw out their own
garbage and community groups are organizing their own
clean-up schedules.

And the city and the peninsula come out ahead on this
holiday, not only because of the volunteers, but because
it pays for the fireworks with a lodging tax. It doesn’t
have to scrape for funding each year.

One downside of the beach fireworks is the fire department
racks-up a lot of costs putting out fires. Someone always
seems to light the dunes on fire.