9-14-2020 10:14pm

Behind The Scenes Of The Labor Day Fireworks

Rick Amburgey Neighbor

Photo Contributed.

This has been a tough year for just about everyone. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many things to be cancelled or postponed. Other things were able to happen with some changes. One of those things was the Labor Day Fireworks.

Joe Rozzi, of Rozzi's Famous Fireworks, talked to Warren County Online News last week about how they were able to pull off the annual fireworks display this year. Rozzi said they knew around the Fourth of July that Riverfest probably would not happen this year. There had to be an alternative plan if the fireworks display was going to happen at all.

Rozzi said they had to get creative when doing Fourth of July fireworks displays. Some of the cities and municipalities wanted to still have their display, while others decided to cancel it for 2020. He said a few places decided to have fireworks without the event and asked residents to stay home or watch from parking lots. Loveland decided to break their event up and do it from two different locations.

The alternative plan for the Labor Day display came from those displays. Rozzi said the first plan was to shoot the fireworks from the city parks around Cincinnati. However, he said Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley was worried that people would show up downtown anyway. "That plan didn't work so we moved to another plan," Rozzi said, adding that the new plan was to do the fireworks from an undisclosed location.

There were a couple of sites considered, but they didn't work out. Rozzi had a relationship with the Kentucky Speedway and he reached out to them. He thought it was far enough off the beaten path and it had an area for TV stations to broadcast, which was important.

Rozzi said WEBN did a pretty good job of throwing people off of the real location. "Somehow it took off that it was going to be somewhere in Hamilton. I have no idea how, but it just took off like wildfire, so much so that we were seeing photoshopped pictures of trucks with our logo on it spotted in Hamilton," he said.

There weren't a lot of people who knew about the location. Rozzi said that they didn't wear their t-shirts on site, none of their logos appeared and the hotels were reserved by Kentucky Speedway. He said they didn't get the permit until the last minute in case there was a records request, adding that the local fire department was on board with that.

WEBN tried to get people to make guesses about the location. Rozzi said they would post random pictures of a river or a random picture of a bike path, asking if it could be the location. There were people who guessed that the undisclosed location might be the Kentucky Speedway. "It wasn't getting any likes. It wasn't getting any shares," he said.

Other guesses included Great American Ball Park, Coney Island, East Fork Lake and Kings Island. Rozzi said Kings Island was one of the earlier options. "They tried to make it work, but at the end of the day, the park was open until 10 that day," he said.

Rozzi said Kentucky Speedway is about 20 miles away from Florence and it is on a four-lane road that is sparsely travelled. He said they caught a guy taking pictures two or three days before the fireworks. "Apparently it was a local guy. He posted it and it didn't get any traction," he said. Rozzi said he didn't know if it was because the Hamilton thing took off or if Kentucky Speedway didn't make sense for enough people.

When they started setting up, Rozzi said anybody could have seen what they were doing. "It got down to the last couple of days. We were waiting for something big to happen and it never did." He said the only thing that made him nervous was if word got out about the location and 10,000 cars showed up. Rozzi said they probably would have seen some traction two or three days before that if it were going viral. "That was always a concern in the back of my mind that if it goes viral on social media and it looks like we are going to get 10,000 cars that it was going to get shut down," he said.

That never happened. While they usually plan the Labor Day fireworks display in about a month, it was planned in closer to two weeks this year. Rozzi said they had more flexibility this year because they were on land. "We had to get creative with the waterfall," he said. Rozzi didn't think anybody expected to see that, which was a little over 300 feet. "We had the room to do it," he said.

Rozzi said the fireworks display means a lot to the people in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area, adding that people who came with their parents when they were little are now bringing their kids. "It's more to us than just the end of the summer blast, it's all about this community," he said.