MOSES LAKE — While July 4, 2020, had some local fire departments and districts scrambling for a few hours, overall it was a relatively calm night.

“We responded to 14 fire calls Saturday night,” Moses Lake Fire Chief Brett Bastian said. “It’s about par for the course.”

Bastian said most of the fire calls were concentrated in a couple of hours.

“We had trucks deployed in different areas of town,” he said, which helped reduce response times and meant crews could get to fires, and get them out, more quickly. A fire at the launch site for the Freedom Festival fireworks display burned through grass and weeds and threatened some houses, but it was contained before it reached them.

A Moses Lake ordinance bans fireworks within the city limits.

“They have been illegal in the city limits for more than a decade,” he said.

Bastian said the Moses Lake Police Department does enforce the ordinance.

“But it comes down to simply having enough officers to enforce this,” he said.

However, Bastian said the ordinance has helped to reduce the amount of fireworks set off in the city, and the fires that come with them.

“The ban actually has saved us from some fires,” he said.

Grant County Fire District No. 5 battalion chief Bob Horst said district personnel responded to 22 fire calls July 4 and 5. That was about the same number of fire calls as 2019 but well below 2018, Horst said.

Fire District No. 5 covers the area around Moses Lake.

Horst attributed the relatively calm night in part to weather conditions.

“No wind. This year we had very light winds compared to previous years,” he said.

“We weren’t sure what to expect, with it (July 4) being Saturday,” Horst said. “We were planning for it to be a lot busier.”

Grant County Fire District No. 7 Chief Kirk Sheppard said district crews responded to five fireworks-related fires on July 4 and two more on July 5. “It’s way more than normal for us,” Sheppard said. Soap Lake and the surrounding area are covered by Fire District No. 7.

Sheppard said some of the incidents in Soap Lake were tied to the use of intoxicants. “Alcohol influenced the decision to shoot off fireworks,” he said.

Public information officer Michele Talley said Grant County Fire District No. 3, for Quincy and the surrounding area, responded to 23 calls from July 3 through 5.

“It was busy for us, as it was for most (fire) districts.” Talley said.

On the other hand, Grant County Fire District No. 13 Chief Jim Stucky said it was a quiet July 4 weekend in the district, which covers the area around Ephrata.

“We had zero fires,” he said. “The last couple years, we’ve not had much.”

“All in all, our Fourth of July was very mild,” Ephrata Fire Chief Jeremy Burns said. There were no fireworks-related calls on July 4, although there were two on July 2.

Fireworks are suspected as the cause of a July 2 fire in a trash receptacle in Ephrata, he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].