Were they rockets over Ripon or bombs over Baghdad?

It was hard for emergency personnel to in the South County to tell the difference Wednesday night with all of the bottle rockets and aerial mortars zipping through the breezy night air.

While some illegal fireworks go with the territory on Fourth of July, the sheer number that Ripon Consolidated Fire District Chief Dennis Bitters witnessed himself left him stunned – easily doubling, he said, the number fired off in the city the year before and increasing in size and sophistication.

The story was the same in Manteca as well as Lathrop.

Manteca public safety workers reported a significant upswing in illegal fireworks. Callers to the Bulletin complained that some neighborhoods had aerial displays - such as near Northgate Park and Lincoln School - that rivaled the city’s aerial fireworks display. One resident said his neighborhood sounded like a “war zone.”

“Some of these that we’re seeing now are near professional grade and that’s troubling because people don’t think about the fallout associated with that,” Bitters said. “Part of the reason we don’t have the fireworks at the high school anymore is because of that reason and that was with planning.

“These people aren’t thinking about that or the fact that their neighbor has a shake roof.”

And even though the district has the power to write tickets to those that they catch violating the law, a lack of manpower coupled with one of their busier days makes it hard for enforcement to actually take place.

Bitters said that having people able to respond to medical calls as well as water rescues – the Stanislaus River and Caswell Memorial State Park serve as routine stops for Ripon firefighters tasked with pulling swimmers that exceed their level of expertise from the cold, fast-moving wavers – is crucial and leaves few other tools at his disposal.

At that point, he said, it becomes a wait-and-see game with the hope that nothing serious actually happens.

“The times that we do find the houses we think they’re coming from they run inside and hide them and we can’t go in and search their house,” he said. “We have to see them and we don’t have the manpower to put people (out on patrol)for that purpose.

“I think that next year it’s something that we’re going to have to seriously look at doing.”

Even though Ripon might have escaped a fireworks-related blaze, the Lathrop-Manteca Fire District wasn’t quite as lucky – responding to a grassfire near Garden and Division Roads in rural San Joaquin County and finding a still-hot barbecue and evidence of aerial mortars that had been lit off in the area.

The fire, Lathrop-Manteca Chief Gene Neely said, was extinguished without incident, but showed how an errant spark or clump of sulfur can produce unintended consequences.

“When more people start doing it then it brings even more people out and that makes it even harder to enforce,” Neely said. “The first thing a lot of people do is hide them when they see us or a police car come by. You can see them going up in the air but by the time we get there they are either all gone or they’re hidden somewhere.

“Hopefully it won’t take something tragic for people to realize that they’re dangerous and illegal for a reason.”

Chrissy Madison said that she didn’t mind her neighbors that spent the evening lighting sparklers or even the loud piercing whistlers that she personally found to be annoying.

But when the booms started ringing once the sun went down and her dogs started going nuts she got angry.

“It’s supposed to be the night when neighbors come together and everybody has a good time,” she said. “And for a little while, that’s what it was like. But then people have to come out and ruin it for everybody else.

“My dogs couldn’t figure out what was going on and all I could do was close all of the windows and the doors. That’s not the way that you’re supposed to spend Fourth of July.”