The Souza family have lighting explosives down to a science — they’ve been doing it for 30 years at fireworks shows all over the country.

“We’re all careful, we’ve had lots of training and we don’t smoke,” laughed Matt Gilfillan, show producer for the Northern California branch of his family’s business, Pyro Spectaculars. The company was hired to put on Eureka’s Fourth of July fireworks show after several businesses recently stepped up to pay for it.

“We use caution. It’s a trade, it’s a lifestyle — you grow up with it,” Gilfillan said. “If I ever make a mistake, I have lots of people watching who will let me know.”

“Lots of people” means of his entire family, from his grandfather Bob, to his mother and father, uncle, cousins and brother. “It was started by my grandfather. The company is only 30 years old, but my family have been doing fireworks for five generations coming from Portugal,” he said.

Founder Manuel de Souza, known as “Papagaio,” was the pioneer of animated pyrotechnic display set to music. In the early 1900s, he carried his fireworks business from the Azores to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The family purchases fireworks from all over the world — from China, Mexico, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and the United States to name a few. Currently, Gilfillan’s grandfather and his mother are on the east coast preparing for the largest fireworks show in the nation- the Macy’s fireworks celebration in New York City broadcasted on NBC.

The family owned company has also provided the pyrotechnics for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., the Statue of Liberty’s 100th Anniversary, various Super Bowls, President Reagan’s inauguration, as well as for amusement parks including Disneyland, Disney World and the Six Flags chain.

Gilfillan said that most shows about the size of the one taking place in Eureka are a mix of large- and small-caliber shells, but since the order came in late this year, Eureka will actually be getting the most bang for its buck. “It was very serendipitous — we had an operator free up at the last minute,” he said, and since most of the other orders were already completed, plenty of the large-caliber fireworks were left. “The first thing I did was see what kind of fireworks we had and we had some substantially larger — five, six and eight-inch shells available. Your show is consisted of mostly large-caliber shells. Because of the budget of your show and the tolerances allotted to us because its in the bay, we can do the larger-caliber shells.”

Gilfillan said that most shows of similar size use more of the smaller three or four inch shells, but he added “the most spectacular things that can be done are with the larger-caliber shells.”

After selecting the shells, it is then up to the operator to decide how and at what sequence to shoot them off the barge. “There’s a lot of them, so we have an electric firing system,” Gilfillan explained. “It organizes the shows into segments and the firing panel allows the operator to shoot each cue at his discretion...operators have kind of an ‘artistic license’ when they put together their show.”

Transporting the explosives from the plant in Sacramento to Eureka, is a whole show all its own, Gilfillan said. “That is the most challenging part of our business at this point — transportation.” Drivers have to abide by the same regulations as big rig drivers, and store the fireworks in Department of Transportation-approved containers.

“The fireworks are not heavily impact-sensitive and its not like shipping nitro-glycerine or some blasting agent, but we do have to secure them in D.O.T. containers and have CHP regulations that we have to abide by. We’re very well-regulated.”

While Gilfillan said no major catastrophes have happened at any of the shows he has been a part of, he said there was an explosion at one of the company’s plants in 1997, that resulted in the death of a plant manager. “He was like a mentor to me and my cousin,” he said. Despite the tragedy and the fact that safety is of utmost priority when working in the storage bunkers, Gilfillan said it can sometimes be hard to ignore the fact that he is surrounded by “60,000 pounds of fireworks.”

“It’s one of those things — I’ll be alone in one of the bunkers packing for one of the shows and you get an eerie feeling. I walk outside, have a drink of water, and go back to work.”

As for the Eureka fireworks show, Gilfillan said: “I hope those people who came forward to pay for it got a lot of credit. It will be a great show. We’ll do our best and hopefully everybody will love it.”