Teenager Attacks Firefighters With Fireworks

A teenager has been sent to prison for 6 months following an attack on firefighters. Greig Deans was one of a gang of teenagers who were involved in launching fireworks at the emergency services as they responded to an emergency call out on bonfire night last year. Allegedly, Deans, now 16, threw a firework at an emergency crew who were called to deal with an illegal bonfire in Aberdeen. He was sentenced to six months in rehabilitation in a young offender’s institute with the Aberdeen Sheriff Court indicating that his detention was necessary as a deterrent to others.

It is clear that this kind of action puts in real danger the lives of the emergency services. The Sheriff acknowledged that this was the first offence for Deans and seemed to indicate that he was reluctant to take the decision to provide such a sentence on someone with no previous history of violence, but that he felt he had no choice. 

It would have been easy for one of the fireworks to have injured a member of the fire service or the police who attended the scene or even a member of the general public and it is this kind of reckless behaviour that is often responsible for causing injury to people. Members of the emergency services have a difficult enough job without having to deal with these unnecessary risks and dangers.

The obvious type of injury which targeted parties might suffer would be burn injuries but it is easy to forget the sort of speeds that firework rockets can travel at, and the sheer speed can cause them to penetrate skin, and they have also been known to impale people.