A laser light show with a patriotic theme will replace Vienna’s traditional fireworks display this Fourth of July after an accident last year injured about a dozen spectators.
The Vienna Town Council voted Monday to spend as much as $22,000 on a contract with Baltimore’s Image Engineering to put on the display at the same field near Vienna Elementary School as years past.
“This is going to be a real experiment,” Vienna spokeswoman Marie Kisner said.
The Town Council this year “didn’t want to take a chance” at the tightly spaced field that barely meets the fire marshal’s distance requirements for fireworks displays, she said.
The horrific accident last year was the worst of a series of malfunctioning fireworks displays throughout Northern Virginia, injuring 11 onlookers and hospitalizing seven of them. During the finale, a faulty mortar shot sideways into the crowd, instead of directly upward.
The event was put on by Ronks, Pa., company Schaefer Pyrotechnics, which had produced the town’s annual fireworks display for at least the past decade and was later cleared of wrongdoing following a county investigation. The products were manufactured in China.
The 20- to 30-minute laser light show, combined with a small-scale fireworks show, will be more expensive than the traditional display, Kisner said. “But it’s still actually lower in cost than the regular fireworks displays from some of our surrounding jurisdictions.”
Image Engineering uses “lasers, pyrotechnics, large format projections and other special effects” during its events, according to a letter to the town from the firm. It has worked national-scale events including the unveiling of the renovated Washington Monument and the 120th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.
