When your next-door neighbors are shooting off rockets like it’s the halftime show at the Super Bowl and your beloved dog is missing and you think you will never breathe right or hear well again, Hawaii’s illegal fireworks problem seems like the most dangerous, lawless, uncontrollable thing ever. Somebody oughta …!

And then the smoke literally clears, and grandpa goes outside the next morning to sweep up the red paper and mortar shells and everyone’s attention turns to other irritations.

There are so many reasons why Oahu looks like a war zone on New Year’s, but perhaps the biggest is that nobody stays mad long enough to change things. Today is Jan. 6. Doesn’t New Year’s fireworks seem like old news? It’s a problem that almost immediately loses urgency. It’s bad when it’s bad, and then it’s done for a year.

In 2011 a state task force on illegal fireworks delivered its report to the Legislature. Thirty-three people on the task force held six public meetings and gathered testimony from all quarters, including county police departments, the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Defense, state Department of Agriculture, the shipping industry and representatives of the legal fireworks industry. The task force consisted of legislators and representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Customs and Border Patrol; U.S. Product Safety Commission; Matson; Hawaiian Trucking; and so on. The point is, if anyone dares call for more study or a focus group, please note that this group was focused and studying six years ago and the long-term result was what happened Saturday night.

That is not meant to be disparaging of the task force or its report, which concluded that enforcement needs to be at the point of entry, though it is impossible to comb through every container at the docks, and that arrests of the people lighting the fuses are difficult because of the legal requirements of probable cause and the lack of willing eyewitnesses.

They even entertained some novel ideas, like getting a posse of volunteers to go around on New Year’s Eve and keep the peace:

“Such volunteers would be unarmed and lack the training necessary to deal with potentially dangerous and confrontational fireworks situations.”

This week HPD Central Patrol assistant chief Alan Bluemke did a laudable job answering questions about what the Police Department did while the entire island was exploding. He tried to point out the obvious without sounding condescending or defensive: When you see a commercial-grade aerial go off down the street and call 911, no matter how fast an officer gets there, the person who lit the fuse is long gone.

So what can be done? Higher penalties? More money for searches at the docks? It’s a once-a-year problem with no easy solution. Yeah, somebody oughta … but as the 2011 report said:

“Even when significant arrests occur, they are so few and far between that the public forgets about them and the arrests lose their preemptive effect.”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.