"What they did was totally wrong. I thought it was stupid. It wasn't fair to me and the people who stuck that show out," said Southwest Philadelphia resident Wendy Gines, who brought her two grandchildren to the concert and fireworks show.
Gines and legions of others couldn't fathom why city officials would dispel the crowd, only to start the fireworks show minutes later.
The city's short answer yesterday? It's hard to predict the weather.
An electrical storm appeared to be bearing down on the Parkway when officials told people to leave, said Loree Jones, the city's new managing director and the senior official on the scene Wednesday.
"Whenever there is a storm like that, people are generally advised not to be outside, in groups, under trees and standing in water," said Jones, who assumed her new post last month. "We had all those conditions."
Though it had been raining hard on the crowd for hours, thunderstorms had skirted the area until about 10:30 p.m., Jones said. When she received a report from the National Weather Service that lightning could be coming, she said, she had no choice but to dispel the crowd.
"What people should know is that we're really concerned with their safety first," Jones said.
The managing director made the announcement in a brief interview on 6ABC, which was telecasting the show. At the time, she danced around the question of whether the fireworks display had actually been canceled.
Asked whether she'd been evasive out of concern that revelers wouldn't leave if they thought fireworks were coming, Jones replied: "That definitely was a possibility."
As it turned out, the lightning strikes never materialized. Instead, within minutes the clouds parted and the rain almost completely stopped. So Jones decided to go ahead and start the pyrotechnic display.
"Think about it this way," said Caroline Fay Welch, vice president of programming at 6ABC, which broadcast the show.
