wikipedia/久留米市民

Fireworks have to land somewhere — some would prefer that it be in the water.

San Diego has had 111 fireworks events since 2011, when the state water-quality control board began requiring permits — not including SeaWorld's maximum of 150 a year, which are counted under a different permit.

Most of those events conducted under a different permit have been on San Diego and Mission bays and many of those seem to launch off a barge near the U.S.S. Midway Museum — at least according to the permit documents.

The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board has the nation's first program requiring National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits for fireworks, according to Livia Borak, attorney for the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation. Her clients have sued the regional board, saying the permit doesn't go far enough.

"The only thing enrollees have to do is clean up within 24 hours and report back," Borak said.

The foundation would like to see two added requirements: first, that the purveyors monitor each discharge — test the water for chemicals and metals and other pollutants left behind. And they'd like to see fireworks discharges into sensitive habitat and ocean areas prohibited.

Borak and Coast Law Firm are infamous for their widely reported quest to compel the La Jolla Fourth of July fireworks to first seek a permit and then clean up. The suit was settled last year.

"In La Jolla, the chemicals end up in the underwater ecological preserve there," she says. "Look, if you took the resultant debris and chemicals, put them into buckets and just dumped them there without the cool fireworks, it would be incredibly obvious to people why this is a problem."

But, for now, the boom purveyors just report how many were fired off and how much debris was picked up. That's important, because there are wide variances in the reported amount of debris gathered later.

The 22nd Agriculture District — the Del Mar Fairgrounds — launched its July 4th display over land. The detailed report filed indicates that with 490 pounds shot off, crews recovered 170 pounds of dry debris from the surrounding grounds — the collection effort detailed in photos filed with the report.

SeaWorld, likely the lead fireworks consumer in San Diego, was the first to get a fireworks permit, and their fireworks crew reports picking up debris in similar proportions, according to permit documents. In its second quarter of 2014 reports, which end with the Fourth of July, every show except the Fourth used 165.5 pounds of fireworks and the staff recovered between 30 pounds and 53 pounds of debris. On the Fourth, SeaWorld blew off 880 pounds of fireworks and collected 192.5 pounds of debris.

A fireworks show sponsored by Verizon Wireless by the Midway Museum on July 23, 2014, resulted in the recovery of just 16 pounds dry and 2.5 pounds of wet debris from setting off 157 pounds of fireworks.

A December 19, 2014, fireworks display of 465 pounds, launched from a barge in the ocean in front of grocery-chain billionaire Ron Burkle's La Jolla Farms Road megamansion, yielded a mere 21 pounds of wet and dry debris, according to the permit report.

The biggest show, the Big Bay Boom, reported firing nearly 1500 shells from three barges. But they didn't provide a pre-bang weight and reported recovering five pounds of dry debris and twelve pounds of wet debris. None were using "green" or alternative fireworks, according to the reports they filed.

"The Big Bay Boom and La Jolla, for example, are generating significantly less debris [than the Del Mar Fairgrounds] so it must be ending up in the water," Borak says. "Wouldn't it be great to know what the real impact is?"