For more than 12 hours before the Fourth of July fireworks show, Bob Miles and his pyrotechnic crew are working to set up thousands of explosives to go off in the sky.

“There’s enough shells to spread this show over 40 minutes,” he said about Thursday’s show. “We can’t do that. We can only close the airport down for so long. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Even though the show only lasts about 20 minutes, Miles and his crew are at the airport setting up for much longer.

“We get here at eight o’clock in the morning and we’re usually out of here by midnight,” he said. “It’ll take us about an hour and a half to tear everything down and load everything up into the truck and get out of here.”

Miles, of Decatur, has been detonating fireworks since he was a small child.

“When I was small, you know, my parents didn’t have a lot of money and I’d always get just a few fireworks for the Fourth of July back in the old days. When I got older, I finally realized that cities would pay me thousands of dollars to go buy fireworks and go shoot them,” he said about his once-a-year job.

During the rest of the year, Miles is a construction manager at the University of Illinois in Champaign, but detonating fireworks does not take up a lot of time.

He takes about three days off to come down to the Charleston-Mattoon area to do the show.

Miles said his crew consists of 10 members ranging from ages 18 to 70.

“We got a brand new shooter who just turned 18. He’s been involved in fireworks since he could walk,” he said.

When people start setting off fireworks professionally, they either love it or decide it is too dangerous, Miles said.

“We have people who will shoot fireworks for the rest of their life or they’ll never come back again. There’s no in between,” he said. “They either go ‘oh my gosh, that looks way too dangerous. I never want to be around it again,’ or you’ve got the ones that go, ‘can we do it again tomorrow night?’”

Miles said they have been detonating fireworks for the Charleston-Mattoon area for about 15 years.

The fireworks show moved from Peterson Park in Mattoon to the airport because structures and the public were too close to the guns. At this time, Mattoon and Charleston combined their fireworks show.

The pyrotechnic crew uses electric igniters so they do not have to fire the explosives by hand.

However, Miles and his crew are still about 60 feet from the guns.

“Everyone else is 600 feet away from the guns,” he said. “It’s a lot different show out there than it is here. Your neck will be stiff because it’s all over your head with a lot of burning paper falling down all the time.”

Miles said the noise is booming when he is that close.

Often his crew will wear earmuffs to block some of the noise.

However Miles said he cannot completely close off his hearing because he needs to be able to hear how the shells come out of the guns.

“You really do need to hear the show because you hear every one of those shells. If there’s something wrong, you know it immediately because it sounds different,” Miles said.

They also have spotters to watch every shell come out of the gun.

“If one goes up and doesn’t go off, that’s the most dangerous shell in fireworks,” Miles said. “You don’t want those falling from 500 feet in the sky and hitting you on the head.”

If a shell goes up and does not go off, Miles said he hears a loud thump on the ground.

“If that occurs, we have to find that shell and destroy it,” he said. “ We have to find it before somebody else does.”

In the past 15 years they have been shooting fireworks for the area, Miles said shells going up and not off has only occurred twice.

“That’s not bad out of the thousands and thousands of shells we’ve shot,” he said.

Another thing that can happen while they are setting off the fireworks is the shell might fall out of the gun.

“That shell’s going to detonate no matter where it is whether it’s 400 feet in the air or four feet off the ground,” Miles said.

When a shell detonates, the stars come out.

“Those stars come out burning over 2,000 degrees,” he said. “If you lay one in the palm of your hand and I would light it, virtually before you could get it out of your hand, it would burn half way or all the way through just like butter.”

About five years ago, Miles said they had a red magnesium shell fall out of the gun.

“It kind of looked like the old Star Trek when they kicked into (warp speed) when the stars went shooting by,” he said about his crew being 60 feet away from the shell. “Only these, you’re going in reverse. All those stars were zipping by.”

Miles said his crew tries not to have interesting stories because they usually mean something went wrong.

Despite the possibility of something going wrong, Miles said he and his crew love what they do.

“We work very long hours for a very short period of time but it’s worth it,” he said.

Amanda Wilkinson can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].