Fireworks ready for July 4th celebration – Loveland Reporter-Herald

Brett Gearhart chats and laughs with other Angel Light Pyrotechnics volunteers while setting up shells Wednesday for the July 4 fireworks show at Lake Loveland. (Jenny Sparks/Loveland Reporter-Herald)

Angel Light Pyrotechnics, the company that has put on Loveland’s annual Fourth of July fireworks show for 20 years, is well on its way to preparing for this year’s show at North Lake Park.

The show will begin promptly at 9:17 p.m. Thursday, shortly after sunset, and will last about 18 highly choreographed minutes, Angel Light owner Larry Darrington said Wednesday as he oversaw a handful of volunteers checking the shells for duds.

“It’s almost like conducting an orchestra,” he said. “This is where art meets industry. It’s the explosives industry, but it’s the art of pyrotechnics. We have the bureaucracy and the logistics, but then there’s the artistic side where the sky is my canvas, I can paint it with fireworks.”

Darrington loved the Fourth of July as a kid and cried when the holiday passed, but it wasn’t until college that he went from amateur to professional.

Twenty years ago, the industry was different. Today, most of the firing is done by computer, but in his early days, he would walk around in the dark with a flashlight and walkie-talkie, ordering his volunteers to reload the smoking mortars with fresh shells and ignite them at the right time to make sure the spectacle he saw in his head would play out in the sky.

Planning for each show takes 13 months, so work has already begun on next year’s fireworks display, and preparations for the United States’ 250th birthday in 2026 will also be underway soon.

On Thursday, shells will be fired every hour starting at 3 p.m. to count down the time until the show begins, what Darrington calls “announcement bombs.”

Loveland is one of three Fourth of July shows Angel Light is hosting Thursday, the other two being Horseshoe Reservoir and Timnath.

This is an annual gig for Darrington and his team, and they are currently preparing to compete at the Larimer County Fair and Rodeo later this year.

“We’ve kind of narrowed it down to our favorite shows, which is nice,” he said. “We didn’t have that luxury a few years ago, we had to do every show to make a living. But now we’ve focused on our favorite shows and we have a well-oiled machine.”

The forecast for Thursday looks clear, but weather is always a factor during fireworks shows, so residents can text LVEvents at 888-777 to receive weather alerts and other show updates from the city of Loveland.