New Year's Eve Set Up Day 2

Another good day with the crew in high spirits, progress has been excellent as has been the weather, all be it a little cold on the water with the moderate winds we have experienced today. All of the shells for two of the three barges have been loaded and wired in. Some of the statistics of quantity of effects includes nearly 2,400 x 75mm shells, 2,800 x 100mm shells, 1,200 x 125mm shells and 60 x 150mm shells. The emphasis is more on lower level shells because the display is broadcast live on BBC 1 and last year watched by over 11 million people, the display is primarily designed for the 16 : 9 wide screen aspect ratio.


With a large quantity of fireworks one challenge that we have to overcome is the temporary storage of fireworks, we licence an explosive store with the local authority under MSER, this enables us to rig the display far more safely with a limited quantity of fireworks on the barges at any one time. With a display of this size, the storage limit we can licence is well short of the total net explosive content in the display, in order to overcome this we have a type II explosive vehicle which ferries limited quantities from the factory in Cambridgeshire each day, today we had two trips, one arriving first thing in the morning with one barge and the second arrived just after lunch with the second barge, in all six trips will be required to ferry all the fireworks to the site.


We use a large number of roman candles and single shot effects to provide continuity and to emphasise the synchronisation with the soundtrack, in all we will fire in excess of 4,400 x 30mm effects, 2,800 x 45mm roman candles and shot tubes and 800 x 60mm fireworks. With this quantity of fireworks fired from so many locations synchronised to a sound track and all fired at midnight we require a very robust and reliable firing system. FireOne has proven itself to be the market leader for these types of large scale events and we have invested heavily in this system. With a total of 12 XL4 control panels and 5 XLII panels, over 250 firing modules, a considerable quantity of equipment is required. All of the control panels including the back up controls have to be fully charged and have the correct fire file downloaded in to the panel.


Once again the London Eye team had another productive night rigging the final cradles, with plunging temperatures and fresh winds picking up, our crew had to rotate every hour so as to avoid excessive exposure to the elements. With all of the cradles now rigged, next job is to network the modules and run the data cable, approximately 2 kilometers of data cable alone for the Eye and Hub have to be attached in looms around the inner rim and leg of the Hub.