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Alex Cabrero Reporting"It's just always amazing how much you get. We bring in two to three loads a day."
July 4th fun is now behind us, but for some, they're still going to have to pay for it. You may have seen a good number of illegal fireworks going off in your neighborhood last night, and wondered. Well today, the Utah Highway Patrol showed us some of the stash they confiscated.
Utah law says it's illegal to have fireworks that launch and explode in the air, but every year, you see those kinds of fireworks. The Utah Highway Patrol says most of them come from Evanston, Wyoming, and this year they caught a lot of people bringing them into Utah.
If Sgt. Harley Watkins really wanted to, he could have one heck of a party.
Sgt. Watkins; "Right here is cherry bomb artillery shells."
His own family knows it.
Sgt. Harley Watkins: "I have family saying, ‘Let's go to Evanston and get it,' and no, we can't do that."
That's mainly because he's with the Utah Highway Patrol and it's his job to keep this kind of stuff out of Utah. Every July 4th, Utahn's head to the Wyoming border to get their big bang fix; and every year, Watkins fixes them.
Sgt. Watkins: "All this corner I cleared out specifically for this weekend, and now it's back up to full again."
Yeah, his evidence room is full of the kinds of things you have to run away from after lighting, the kinds of things that are illegal in Utah.
Sgt. Harley Watkins: "No, I don't believe people realize it's punishable by jail time."
Having illegal fireworks is a class B misdemeanor. If serious enough, Sgt. Watkins says the government could place offenders on the no-fly list for having explosives.
Sgt. Harley Watkins: "It's just one of those things where people don't realize how serious it is."
Most of the time, when he catches someone, Watkins says they don't see the big deal in it, that they're just trying to have some fun. But, he says it's still his job to enforce the states laws.
Sgt. Harley Watkins: "It's kind of like speeding, everyone does it, but nobody wants to admit it. Or, ‘I was only going five miles per hour over.' Well guess what? That's still against the law."
