The final week of June 2025 will enter the record books as having set a new high for the month of 35.6C, achieved on the day I interviewed Team BEM. Fortunately, cooler and much less humid conditions were present for the opening of the 39th edition of the Montreal International Fireworks competition.
A large audience were expectantly awaiting the start of the display when an announcement was made a few minutes prior to 10pm that the start would be delayed by a short interval to “optimize the quality of the performance”. This lead to all sorts of speculation as to whether there was a technical issue, but when I glanced at the control room, everyone seemed calm and relaxed. Finally, the announcement was made that the countdown had begun and about a minute later, we had the real countdown from 10 in the inimitable way Michel Lacroix always performs it, though the lights on the Jacques Cartier bridge apparently declined to participate.
As this display was not in-competition, a full review is not necessary. The soundtrack was enjoyable, despite being wholly composed of “new Latino music” – none of which I was familiar with. This time, we had four laser segments to divide the five minutes that’s now compulsory in the 30 minute display. I’m still not completely sold on the integrations of lasers – as there was virtually no smoke last night it’s hard to compare two segments versus four. Potentially four segments gives more chance to allow smoke to dissipate. I guess we’ll see how this works as the competition progresses.
The pyrotechnical design was on the conservative side, which makes sense for an opening show, but we did see some interesting butterfly-effect cakes as well as the use of daylight smoke shells plus some thrilling water mine cakes.
As for the late start to the display? Paul Csukassy told me afterward what the story was. As usual, during the protocol part of the evening, a bouquet of fireworks was shot. Unbeknownst to the audience, falling sparks from this bouquet ignited the fluff from the poplar and cottonwood trees that had accumulated amongst the bushes on ramp 1. This burned strongly enough to ignite the bushes themselves. Despite pyrotechnicians being in place with fire extinguishers, they were unable to contain the blaze and so called for the firemen (who are stationed at several places near the ramps) to come and assist. Indeed, I did notice a firetruck leaving the ramps a few minutes after 10pm.
Thankfully everything was safely fired without any problems so kudos to the fire team for responding rapidly.