City botches fireworks safety response

In a previous lifetime, I was a partner in a media consulting firm that, among other things, spent a lot of time advising large corporations on what to say during times of crisis. We also developed and taught a one-day course in crisis communications. For that course, I developed a video library of individuals who handled crisis communications superbly along with those who had completely botched it. One of the videos I used to illustrate this latter category involved an accident that occurred on the site of one of those traveling carnivals that set up rides and other attractions in the middle of an urban setting. As this particular carnival was setting up on a vacant lot located alongside a busy road about two miles from downtown Dallas, one of their workers was crushed to death in front of horrified onlookers (including children) when one of the rides collapsed. On the subsequent newscast, the operator of the carnival appeared on screen and said for all the world to hear: "Thank goodness it was one of our own employees who was killed." Whenever I played the tape of that news segment to one of my classes, an audible groan could be heard.

I never thought I would ever hear a replay of that and I didn’t, for the longest time, That is, until Tuesday night at the Kyle City Council meeting when Kerry Urbanowicz, the city’s Parks and Recreation director, tried to reassure the council and the assembled masses about an upcoming Independence Day fireworks show planned for the city to be produced by Pyro Shows of Texas by telling everyone that if someone gets killed by the fireworks, it’s likely to be an employee of Pyro and not an independent contractor.

Hey, I’m not making this up. That’s what he said.

All this concern about Pyro stems from the fact that last week, the family of an independent contractor who was killed when he was hired by Pyro to put on an Independence Day fireworks in Comanche, Texas, a couple years ago filed suit against Pyro and the manufacturers of the fireworks alleging those fireworks "were defectively designed and sold without proper safety mechanisms or warnings." The suit does claim the fireworks were mishandled. As a matter of fact, the suit claims the explosion that killed the contractor, Russell Reynolds, took place just as Reynolds was about to "handle" the fireworks. It is alleging that any human error that occurred took place back at the Chinese facilities were these explosives were made and shipped from — the exact same facilities that will be making and shipping the explosives to be used here in Kyle.

Now the simple fact that a lawsuit has been filed should not infer guilt by any stretch of the imagination. But, still, it would seem prudent, to me at least, to take a least some cautionary steps to assure our citizens here there is not going to be any real danger of a massive explosion. It would have been prudent, to me at least, to ask Pyro whether it has sought safety reassurances from its manufacturers or if the company has just conducted business as usual since the accident.

About 38 hours ago, I posed that very question to city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck and here we are, a day and a half later, and I have yet to receive any kind of response which tells me very clearly the answer to that question is "No, the city’s staff failed to ask the obvious safety question."

I find that very discomforting and you can bet my family and I will be safely geographically distant from this fireworks show when it occurs.

After informing the council that Pyro is "completely insured," Urbanowicz said "I did reach out this afternoon and talked to the president of the company. What he did want to assure me to assure you is that they were not the producer, the technicians or the manufacturers of the products that were in the claim against them. They were the wholesaler to another group of technicians that were licensed and certified by the state, but they weren’t their technicians. All of our shows that we’ve had with them have been their certified, licensed and insured technicians and that’s what this contract includes."

That’s it. That’s exactly what he said. Not only that, but the council just nodded their collective heads, said OK, and voted unanimously to award the contract to these folks.

Look, the subject of the Comanche lawsuit had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether Pyro was "the wholesaler to another group of technicians " or whether they were the "producer, the technicians or the manufacturers of the products that were in the claim against them." The suit involved allegations over the safety of the products themselves and that’s why the Chinese manufacturers — the exact same manufacturers who are supplying apparently identical products to Kyle — are the principle defendants in the suit. Pyro is named in the suit because it is the company who ordered those products from the manufacturers.

So, if the city refuses to ask the relevant questions, I believe someone should. So yesterday I wrote and submitted the following e-mail message to the Pyro honchos:

"I am a reporter who covers Kyle, Texas, city government for the blog, The Kyle Report. I know that you have a contract with the city to produce an Independence Day fireworks show in Kyle, but I am also aware of the lawsuit filed recently by the family of Russell Reynolds involving his death in a fireworks incident a couple of years ago in Comanche, Texas. Now I know that the simple filing of a lawsuit should not and does not infer guilt in any way, shape or form and I know you cannot, under the advise of attorneys, comment specifically on an ongoing lawsuit. But my question to you is simply this: Have you, at any time, reached out to the fireworks manufacturers you contract with in China since the incident in Comanche to seek additional safety assurances from them?"

I immediately received the standard robo response: "Thanks Pete! We will get in touch with you shortly."

If and when I hear back, I will post it here.

Tuesday night’s City Council meeting was one of the smoothest and most efficient such gatherings I have encountered during my admittedly comparatively brief time covering these proceedings. I think that had a lot to with the speakers actually having the courtesy to adhere to the three-minute time limit during the Citizen Comment period, which lasted all of 28 minutes and featured 11 different speakers talking on 12 different subjects, the predominant subject still being that big, bad, old truck stop planned for I-35 and Yarrington Road, a subject that was not only not on last night’s agenda but a subject that has not been specifically on any council or Planning & Zoning agenda in the last 17 months. But that simple fact is not going to deter concerned citizens from speaking out about it.

It also helped that there was no executive session during last night’s council meeting. The typical Kyle City Council executive session will last at least an hour, many of them approach two hours and one that I recalled stretched to three hours and 44 minutes. The two most time-consuming items on the agenda, which together consumed an hour and seven minutes of the two-hour, 46-minute-meeting, involved discussions over data mining and privacy issues (34 minutes) and another about sustainable developments (33 minutes). Even the council’s review, discussion and debate over various public transportation alternatives took less than a half an hour.

In capsulized form, here is an overview of what the council accomplished of significance to Kyle residents and visitors at Tuesday’s meeting:

• Voted 6-1 (council member Daphne Tenorio opposed, apparently, from what I gathered, because she felt the position wasn’t advertised as well as it could have been) to approve local business owner Allison Wilson to fill Michelle’s Christie’s term on the Planning & Zoning Commission. Christie left the commission last week with plans to return to her home in New Jersey.
• Gushed over the fact that the city is becoming certified as a "Film Friendly Texas" community in the eyes of the Texas Film Commission and unanimously adopted a set of guidelines for filming here. "This has been a long time coming," council member Diane Hervol said. "I’m happy to see it finally coming to full council. In my opinion, I believe it will have an enormous economic impact for Kyle but it will also have a tourism effect. We’ll see people from other parts of the country come to visit Kyle." And she could be correct. I make regular pilgrimages to Monument Valley simply because so many of my favorite John Ford-directed westerns were filmed there and about 10 years ago I made a drive to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming simply because of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The address of my favorite house of all time is 6301 Quebec Drive in Los Angeles because that’s the location of the house where Fred MacMurray first encounters Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. But, then, I’m a certified movie nut as opposed to a certified film friendly Texas community.
• In a move that would have Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, beaming, the council voted 6-1 to rescind a memorandum of understanding with Vigilant Solutions to provide the Kyle Police Department with license plate readers that, theoretically, would have nabbed those miscreants who have dodged paying the city the money they owe due to outstanding warrants. This was a case of those wishing to protect privacy rights and those who feared security breaches against the side of law and order (the latter side being represented by Mayor Pro Tem David Wilson who cast the one dissenting vote). Interestingly, the city’s leader of all things involving law and order, Police Chief Jeff Barnett, who originally advocated for the readers, was notably absent from Tuesday’s meeting. Perhaps he read the tea leaves. I think it’s worth sharing this excerpt from an article about Vigilant published last month in The Atlantic: "Throughout the United States — outside private houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and businesses with large employee parking lots — a private corporation, Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it. It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city. The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers." Well, the Kyle Police are not going to be one of their customers. It’s also worth reading this indictment of Vigilant from the Motherboard website that says, in part: "The state of Texas happened upon a great racket last year in the form of H.B. 121, a new state law effectively turning cops into debt collectors, except with arrest powers and, you know, guns. It does this by legalizing the installation of credit card readers in cop cars. The idea is that drivers detained during traffic stops can be given the option to pay any overdue court fees that might be attached to their name rather than go to jail. Ominous, but it probably keeps some people out of cuffs. Where this gets really creepy is when a company that calls itself Vigilant Solutions enters the picture. Vigilant is in the business of license plate recognition technology, providing police departments with not just cameras and software, but access to a database containing some 2.8 billion plate scans. All of this it provides at ‘no cost.’ Except that it doesn't." Then there’s this from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about automated license plate readers: "ALPRs typically capture sensitive location information on all drivers — not just criminal suspects — and, in aggregate, the information can reveal personal information, such as where you go to church, what doctors you visit, and where you sleep at night." I have attempted to reach Vigilant’s vice president of sales Joseph L. Harzewski III, who argued Vigilant’s case to the council Tuesday, but I keep getting a busy signal when I try to contact him by phone and he has not responded as of this time to my e-mail requests.
• Council members generally agreed the best and most financially reasonable method of providing public transportation is to form a partnership with Kyle/Buda taxi that would be based on the city reimbursing the company for fixed-route transportation expenses on a per-hour basis. The council asked the city’s staff to return in two weeks with a contract for just such a service it could review and possibly approve.
• Delayed for at least two weeks discussions on vehicle idling within the city limits and the possibility of joining the Central Texas Clean Air Coalition to give council members time to collect more information on (1) idling ordinances in other cities and (2) the cost of joining the coalition.