Fireworks
Oʻahu New Year's Eve 2000 fireworks celebration
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 130.1 µg/m³ near Urban Honolulu across 1 covered metro home to 998,747 people. 1 metro recorded their worst day on record.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 5.7 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 5.7 million cigarettes. An awareness illustration of outdoor exposure at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette (Berkeley Earth), counting only the event's ranked days; not a medical dose.
Episode peak
-- cigarettes
The smoke map's scale, replayed over this event: the surface interpolates between covered metros' daily records, framed to the affected region. Hover for a reading, click a metro to pin it to the card. Days a monitor did not report draw nothing.
What happened, in the record
Contemporaneous reporting describes officials' assessment of fireworks use and related smoke during the December 31, 2000 Oʻahu celebration, supporting fireworks as the material source occurrence.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 130.1 µg/m³ | 5.9 | Dec 31, 2000 | Worst day on record |
"Cigarettes, whole event" totals a metro's ranked event days at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette: what a person outdoors there breathed across the event, as the illustration. "All-time standing" is where this episode's days sit in each metro's ranked record (worst-area measure, since 1999). Full local context is on each metro's Air Records page.
The evidence
EPA AQS monitor qualifier 1
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RK — Infrequent Large Gatherings. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RK, Infrequent Large Gatherings.) on 2 PM2.5 samples in the candidate CBSA on 2000-12-31, identifying infrequent large gatherings as affecting the samples. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
Agency and publisher pages 2
- Cayetano calls for O'ahu fireworks ban Contemporaneous reporting states that New Year's fireworks had historically shrouded O'ahu in smoke and reports officials' assessment that the new permit system reduced fireworks use and related smoke during the December 31, 2000 celebration. It corroborates fireworks smoke as a material local source but is not a PM2.5 source-apportionment study.
- Particulate Pollution from New Year Fireworks in Honolulu Later Honolulu observations for 2015–2022 found characteristic sharp PM2.5 peaks around New Year midnight associated with fireworks. The study supports the plausibility of the contemporaneous reporting but does not measure or attribute the 2000 event itself.
What remains uncertain
- The retained contemporaneous report is corroboration rather than a PM2.5 source-apportionment study.
Status and provenance
Research preview: this record carries research-only status and its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence review completes. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula.