The city’s crackdown on illegal fireworks this year has been so successful, the Fire Department says it plans to treat Independence Day like any other day.
“This will be the first July 4th, at least in the last 20 or 30 years, that we will have no one extra working and no one working overtime,” Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen told The Post.
“A great number of people who had a good thing going for a long time have now decided there’s no money in this.”
In 1995, fireworks caused 700 blazes, but the total plummeted to a handful last year, officials said.
As of Friday, there had been no fireworks-related blazes this year.
As for injuries, 55 were connected to fireworks in 1995, and just 13 last year, authorities said.
Through Friday, only one person had been hurt this year by the explosives: 10-year-old Tito Hickson, a Staten Island boy who injured his hand last month when a M-85 he had found in his home exploded in his grasp.
The other day in Chinatown, the city’s one-time fireworks capital, The Post went looking for bottle rockets, and walked away with dim sum.
A check with merchants at a dozen shops, who in the past could at least have pointed you in the right direction, turned up no fireworks.
“With police, no more,” said Pin Law, a gift-shop worker on Mott Street. “It’s very hard. Maybe around the New Year.”
Officer David Yat, making his rounds as a community-affairs cop for the Fifth Precinct, credited the NYPD presence with wiping out brazen, open-air selling.
“Maybe they’ve all gone to Jersey,” Yat said. Others are going to Long Island.
On June 7, the fireworks task force – made up of cops, firefighters and federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents – seized 500 cases of fireworks from a warehouse in West Babylon and arrested alleged dealer Frank Rizzo, 44.
About half the $300,000 cache was earmarked for the city, police said.
Prior to the crackdown, Independence Day would start early in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst, South Ozone Park in Queens, and other neighborhoods.
“You couldn’t even breathe,” said Von Essen, who grew up in South Ozone Park, which is known as John Gotti territory.
For years, the local block association would throw a city-approved picnic during the day – then move aside at night as Gotti’s cronies stepped in for a raucous fireworks spectacular.