Updates from the ’Hood’s Premier Electronics Nerd:
6 AM this morning heard some explosions and flashes of light…..thought at first it was a storm, then thought it was fireworks……then helicopter flew over head for a minute, then power went out for a couple seconds, UPS kicked in and then power came back on….exciting Monday morning! 😎
Update: apparently a transformer blew up on 19 Avenue and Dunlap…… according to RPN HOA Facebook page.
So just before dawn cracked this morning, just as the dogs were stirring, beginning to lobby to get down off the bed and into the backyard, the sound of the usual gunfire pealed out across the city.
Or so it seemed.
Then a lot of bangs and booms and cracks and thuds… A little much for the routine drive-by bang-bang. What? Had our pet thugs declared all-out war?
Rolled out of the sack, let the dogs out, and gazed in the direction of the ruckus.
Holy mackerel! It looked like Metrocenter was exploding! Big flashes and bangs and cracklings lit up the sky. A pall of smoke rose above the flaring blasts.
What? Are we celebrating New Year’s at 6 in the morning? Today really isn’t the 31st, is it???
Apparently a cache of New Year’s fireworks went off prematurely. It was quite a display…all of it, unfortunately, on the ground and presumably (even more unfortunately) merrily blowing up someone’s building over there. I heard only one siren running up the I-17 or possibly up Conduit of Blight (the 17 was closed in the wee hours when a motorcycle cop wiped out — amazingly he survived, thank heavens, and the hospital expects him to live).
My guess would be that one of the local sh*theads wondered what would happen if he shot a few automatic rounds into a stash of incendiaries. Now, presumably, he knows. Assuming he’s still with us.
Not a WORD on the local Play-Nooz. Nary a word on Twitter. Nothing on the police department’s Twitter feed. Nothing on the fire department’s Twitter feed. Nothing on the local TV and radio stations’ sites or Twitter feeds. Nothing even on the Twitter feed at Fox 10 News, sadly the only local news website that’s even remotely on the ball. Nothing. Nada. Niente.
It was quite a show. You’d think our corps of pretend journalists here would be thrilled to have something spectacular to kick off yet another slow news day here in beautiful uptown Phoenix. Only one helicopter came by, too late to capture an image of the several fireballs that erupted. He parked over the house for five or ten minutes and then moved on.
Metrocenter, at its inception several decades ago the largest indoor shopping mall in North America, is a ghost mall today. As far as I can tell, the only really viable business there now is a small amusement park that draws people with a roller-coaster ride, a miniature golf course, and an electronic game arcade — the most expensive venue for a kiddie birthday party in the state! 😀 And I believe it’s this successful concern that sponsors the fireworks.
When I first moved into the ’hood, about twenty years ago, Metrocenter used to put on a fireworks display every weekend throughout the summer. As the mall deteriorated, that came to an end — too bad. It was really cool! Now Castles and Coasters (or the mall?) has fireworks on New Year’s and the Fourth of July.
What d’you bet we’ve seen the last of that?