
Thunder over Louisville
The family and I just got home from watching “Thunder over Louisville” which is the opening night of a two-week celebration leading up to the Kentucky Derby. There was an air show all day over the riverfront (living so close to the river, I could watch most of the airshow from my yard). This evening was the Thunder fireworks display. There were over 800,000 people lining the Ohio River on the Kentucky/Indiana border. One hell of a party.
When I moved here 6 years ago I had seen several very large and impressive fireworks shows. Washington DC on July 4th, 1976 (07/04 is my birthday), Disney World on New Year's Eve, and several others. Folks here told me “you gotta check this out, it will blow your mind”. I did and it did.
After more than a decade, the show remains the largest annual pyrotechnic display in North America. Seen by approximately 1-million U.S. Armed Forces, Department of Defense civilian employees and their families stationed in 176 countries and aboard 140 U.S. Navy ships at sea via a July 4th rebroadcast on the American Forces Network, it is the state’s pride. A Discovery Channel documentary on fireworks shows says it best, “Thunder is the Grand-daddy of them all!”.
This is a phenomenal fireworks show. Check out the link above for the video. The fireworks show this year lasted 28 minutes, synced to music that was blaring out of speakers around the riverfront. You could also listen to music on the radio. To give you scope for how large it is, there are 8 barges on each side of one of the bridges from Indiana to Louisville packed with fireworks. They close the bridge and load it up with fireworks as well. That bridge you see in the video lit up with explosions is almost a mile long. If you ever get the chance and you like fireworks, this is a show you’ve got to see. Click here for the original story.
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