Bangs for their bucks: which city has the biggest New Year's Eve fireworks?

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/30/which-city-has-the-biggest-new-years-eve-fireworks

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It costs £1.8m and lasts just 11 minutes – but London’s increasingly famous New Year’s Eve fireworks display is by no means the most extravagant or expensive. Right now in Dubai, Sydney, Paris, Edinburgh, Rio and other cities across the world, teams dedicated to creating these whizzing, banging spectaculars are getting ready to mark 1 January 2015 with tons of gunpowder.

Indeed, enormous fireworks displays have become the ultimate status symbol for moneyed cities. They aren’t just about doing something visually extraordinary: their purpose is to invite the world’s eyes to admire your city looking at its most magical.

“Pictures of London at its best are beamed around the world reminding people how important it is,” says Edward Lister, the Mayor of London’s chief of staff. He says the fireworks display ensures the capital is regarded as one of the world’s “top” cities. Since its first event 11 years ago, the city’s fireworks display is now so popular that this year, for the first time, it has been ticketed, to limit the number of people trying to squeeze on to the Southbank to 100,000. Last year half a million tried.

“There is only enough room for 100,000 people to really enjoy the display – that’s the reality,” says Jim Donald of Jack Morton Worldwide, the company hired by Greater London Authority to organise the event. Donald says the positive PR the city gets from the display is “immeasurable”, and claims it significantly boosts profits for hotels, restaurants and bars.

The event uses 400 different types of firework to create 10,000 explosions. These are fired from the London Eye, three barges and 14 pontoons.

Darryl Fleming of Titanium Fireworks, the event’s pyrotechnic designer, says he starts choreographing it in in September when the soundtrack – “a mash-up of the year’s big tunes” - is finished. “The music dictates what fireworks we use. If it’s something erratic, I’ll go for Scrabbly Comets, or if it’s slow and evocative I’ll go for something more ethereal. There’s a Brocade Waterfall firework that’s very stunning. I’d fire shells above that to empower the audience.”

Fleming and his team start physically constructing the display on 27 December and work right up to the wire. “We can’t get to the Eye until it closes at 5.30pm on New Year’s Eve,” he says. “Then we’ve got three and a half hours to rig 1,200 fireworks. That’s the most nerve-wracking bit for me.”

The firing system is controlled by GPS: at midnight, a satellite sends a signal to the system to start firing. “We turn everything on 15 minutes before midnight, and then you just have to wait. This is one of those jobs where you can’t have a bad day at the office.”

While massive and complicated, however, London’s fireworks display is still something of an up-and-comer. The tradition for huge spectaculars arguably began with Sydney’s Millennium display. There, the firing system is operated by software on 18 computers and a data signal that is synchronised with the display’s soundtrack. When the music starts to play to the audience, the firing locations receive this data signal and it triggers the explosion of 11,000 aerial shells and 40,000 comets and mines off the Harbour Bridge, Opera House and several barges. The cost? Australian $7.2m (£3.79m).

Its producer Aneurin Coffey argues that the price tag is offset by the A$133m it injects into Australia’s economy each year. There’s also a strong branding imperative: because Sydney is the first city to welcome the new year, images of its display are the first to be featured on news channels all over the world.

Keeping it “fresh” is paramount, says Fortunato Foti of Foti Fireworks, who has been designing the display since 1997. “We’ll only use about six effects we’ve used previously,” he says.

To find the next big thing, most pyrotechnic designers head to factories in Luoyang, China. London is planning to use a new Chinese firework this year called the Happy Smiley Face. “Without giving too much away, it will go off during a piece of music that’s particularly evocative of the age,” says Fleming. China’s pre-eminence in firework production is actually somewhat ironic, considering that despite being a global leader in firework production, the country has banned New Year’s Eve displays, citing air pollution. State newswire Xinhua is urging families to use “flowers and electronic substitutes” instead.

Although there isn’t really an arms race between cities for the newest fireworks – development tends to focus on improvement by making colours brighter and shapes more geometric – it is competitive.

“Hugely competitive,” says Chris Pearce, managing director of Jubilee Fireworks, the 2013 champions of the World Pyro Olympics. “Nurturing talent takes a long time, this isn’t an industry you can easily walk into.”

Pearce thinks the best NYE displays are in London, Sydney, Dubai and Paris. “Taipei was on that roll call of cities for a while, but fell off because they weren’t doing anything more creative than anyone else.” Coffey and Donald both confess to keeping an eye on what the other cities are doing – and they even speak to their counterparts in Rio, Edinburgh, Dubai, Paris and New York.

“We all have different ambitions,” says Donald. “London is very lucky, in that we have a unique backdrop to work with. That’s a point of difference. Rio is huge – mile upon mile of barges to fire the fireworks from – but it has no iconic landmark to give it context. Also, you can’t compete with the number of fireworks Dubai fires from the Burj Khalifa – it’s monstrous.”

In fact, with its last New Year’s Eve celebration, Dubai broke the Guinness record for the world’s largest pyrotechnic display, setting off 500,000 fireworks in six minutes. The event cost $6m (£3.86m), making it also the world’s most expensive display, pipping Sydney, London, Edinburgh and Rio to top spot.

And when it’s all over? For Donald, the planning for New Year’s Eve 2015 starts with a full debrief on 6 January. “Every year you just want to get better and better,” he says. “It never gets boring.”