More views of the 2025 fireworks over Seattle here
Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center predicted it would treat more than 50 serious fireworks injuries from the Independence Day weekend’s festivities. As of Monday, it had treated 52.
As the only facility providing Level I trauma services for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, Harborview knows what it is talking about when it comes to July 4th.
“We’re going to see a lot of people who completely changed their lives because they made one simple, bad decision and now either they’ve lost a hand, they’ve lost their eyes, they’ve lost another appendage or worse,” Dr. Arvin Akhavan, an emergency medicine physician at UW Medicine in Seattle, said about Harborview’s yearly totals.
The 2025 injuries came in right at Harborview’s typical average in recent years.
They also came amid a peculiarly prominent trend on American social media this year with MAGA and libertarian accounts celebrating illegal fireworks displays in major cities — “I’ve never seen it lit up like this!”
Maybe so, but the Harborview totals — 21 involving hands, 14 injuring eyes, plus 17 more involving “multiple areas” and “other body areas” — should be proof that there are better ways to celebrate “freedom.”
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somehow I doubt that the people treated by Harborview were MAGA
Somehow I don’t think you actually read the article!
Harborview is “the only facility providing Level I trauma services for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho”
I think the venn diagram of people blowing themselves up with fireworks and MAGA in those four states is probably close to a circle.
I live in Capitol Hill and I heard numerous fireworks set off in my neighborhood (which is not a MAGA hotspot by any means).
Also, the article doesn’t say how many of the people treated were from those states. Given the much smaller population, I’d guess that most of the idiots treated were from Seattle/Western WA…and likely not “MAGA”.
There’s no assertion here about whether or not the injured people are MAGA. (They almost certainly were mostly younger and male, though, since that demographic tends to engage in risk at a higher rate than others.)