It was a shelluva show

COEUR d’ALENE — The gray plastic shell casings washed up on sands of City Beach in Coeur d’Alene under a stone-colored sky, where they were noticed Monday by passersby who notified the Kootenai Environmental Alliance.

The 3-inch casings were what was left after Friday’s holiday fireworks show lighted the sky, bouncing noise and spangled flashes off the surface of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

After being notified Monday of fireworks garbage littering the beach, KEA members alerted the city parks department, which sent workers to clean up the residue.

“There were several hundred casings on the beach,” Dennis Brueggemann of the Alliance said. “They are as long as my pinky.”

And about a half-inch thick. Some of them have burn marks, Brueggeman said.

He feared geese would gobble them up.

“There are a lot of waterfowl down there. I don’t know if they ingest them.”

City parks and recreation employee Mike Kempton and fellow workers policed the casings from the beach Monday afternoon, quietly walking the quarter-mile stretch, back and forth, plinking each casing into buckets, along with chunks of wood debris and cellophane wrappers.

Kempton, who has cleaned up after many of the city’s fireworks shows that usually shoot airborne rockets from a barge in the lake, was unfamiliar with the gray, plastic wizzbangs.

“I’ve never seen these before,” he said. “It’s usually the paper ones that wash up on the beach.”

The amount of waste wasn’t unusual. There is usually more garbage on the beach after a routine summer’s day, he said.

Parks director Bill Greenwood said that after being notified by the Environmental Alliance he went down for a look himself.

Crews clean the beaches and the parks after every event, Greenwood said. The plastic doohickeys may have bobbed on the lake’s surface out of sight until a breeze pushed them onto the shore, days after the show, he said.

“They obviously floated in,” said Greenwood, standing in the center of the beach between Independence Point and the jut of land to the west along Lakeshore Drive. “We found most of them in this section, right here.”

Crews filled a 5-gallon bucket 4 inches deep with the plastic debris.

Brueggemann wonders how many more of the casings are out there, floating on the aluminum calm water, and if the plastic projectiles sink and pollute the lake.

“I don’t know if it’s a recurring issue,” he said. “There were a large number of shots fired.”

More than 4,700 rounds are blasted in less than 10 minutes in the annual holiday kickoff show at City Beach, put on by Pyro Spectacular and paid for by the Hagadone family as a gift to the community.