What Lies Beneath SeaWorld’s Fireworks Launch Pad

Law firm investigator dove beneath the waters of Mission Bay to uncover garbage she says is from fireworks shows. 

Mortar and shell casings and plastic caps littered Fiesta Island’s dog beach just west of a barge used by SeaWorld San Diego to launch its fireworks displays. Below the waterline, ignition wires tangled around sprouting bright green seagrass. 

This is just some of the evidence collected by Natalie Clagett from Coast Law Group, a local environmental law firm, that put SeaWorld on notice it would sue the company for pollution caused by its pyrotechnics. The litter, they allege, violates the Clean Water Act and the company’s permit to launch fireworks 150 nights each year. 

The firm began gathering fireworks debris around the time the San Diego Bird Alliance (formerly known as the Audubon Society San Diego) blamed SeaWorld’s Fourth of July fireworks show for scaring threatened coastal birds from their Mission Bay nesting grounds resulting in deaths. Like a kind of marine detective, Clagett staked out SeaWorld’s fireworks show last year on Memorial Day from the Fiesta Island beach and returned the next day to verify whether company staff collected the aftermath – part of SeaWorld’s Fireworks Best Management Practices Plan.  

Clagett said she didn’t see anyone cleaning the day after the show. So she collected a large plastic tote of shell casings, red plastic caps and wires herself. Later, on Oct. 6, after the summer fireworks season ended, she donned scuba gear and scoured a few hundred feet around the floating fireworks launch pad pulling orange and white ignition cords from the bay floor, video footage from her dive shows.  

“You go down there and it’s just wires. Like, does seagrass grow in orange?” Clagett told Voice of San Diego.

Tracy Sphar, a spokesperson for SeaWorld San Diego, said the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

SeaWorld submits its fireworks management plan to the state Regional Water Quality Control Board which regulates the company’s fireworks permit. The 2022 plan claims none of their fireworks use plastic shell casings and are 100 percent biodegradable. Its post-show clean up method is supposed to be this: A team gathers floating debris from the water’s surface by boat and sweeps and bags debris from the launchpad within 12 hours of the show. Crews should be walking the beach during low tide for five consecutive days following fireworks shows to collect debris. SeaWorld is also supposed to send a dive team once a year to collect debris within a fifty-foot perimeter around the launch pad. 

Clagett said, from her perspective, it doesn’t look like a dive crew hit the area in quite some time.  

The company submits a report after each fireworks display to the State Water Board recording how many fireworks it detonated and the amount of debris collected afterwards. During the Fourth of July show last year, for instance, SeaWorld set off about 1,394 pounds of explosives. Staff gathered about 356 pounds of debris from the launch sites and only about 0.5 pounds of floating debris from the water’s surface – that’s just 25 percent of the total weight of the ignited fireworks. (It’s not clear, however, what percent of a firework’s weight is lost just through detonation.) The park’s president, Tyler Carter, signed the report eleven days after the event.  

Two dogs belonging to Joe Mahaffy, a Point Loma resident since 1996, played through the Fiesta Island tidal zone on Thursday morning. Clagett watched and worried whether dogs and kids swimming in the area would step on the stripped wires she knew littered the bay floor below.  

Mahaffy said he walks his dogs past the fireworks barge almost every day and he finds lots of fireworks debris. Not only do the fireworks explosions disturb his dogs, but so does the mess the shows leave behind. 

“There’s a number of people who come along here that as long as they’re carrying poop bags for their dogs, they have another bag and put garbage in it,” Mahaffy said. “It’s almost exclusively people that walk their dogs that (clean up).”  

Mahaffy said he would be happy to see the fireworks go, a sentiment that’s gaining traction. San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava recently said he would seek to end the nightly shows during the summertime and push for drone or laser shows instead. The public committee that manages Mission Bay Park unanimously voted to oppose fireworks displays, both legal and illegal last September.  

Written by MacKenzie Elmer | January 10, 2025 | Voice of San Diego

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