Unofficial fireworks are illegal in many Bay Area communities, so why do they fill the skies on the Fourth of July holiday?

Every year, local fire departments issue warnings about the risk of personal injuries and the threat of forest fires due to fireworks, especially in the hills where dry grass and vegetation provides fuel for fires to spread quickly.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.