STORY:
Sydney Claiming World's Biggest NYE Fireworks Show

$5 million extravagance to feature the largest fireworks shell ever exploded

Giant floating lanterns in the shape of sea animals will appear under the Harbour Bridge to kick off what organizers are calling biggest fireworks show in the world when Sydney celebrates the arrival of 2000. The $5 million celebrations in Sydney, the first major city in the world to welcome 2000, will be telecast live around the world to an estimated billion people.

"The theme is wonderful Sydney Harbour", the show's creative director Ignatius Jones said at a press conference with Sydney's Lord Mayor Frank Sartor. City leaders expect more than 2 million people to crowd the shoreline around the harbour.

In move to spread the crowd out, the fireworks will be launched from four barges spanning 5.5 kilometres of the harbour, enabling people from Gladesville to Vaucluse to watch them. Sartor said the millennium celebrations would be twice the size of last year's spectacular, which used only two barges.

There will be two fireworks displays, the family display at 9 o'clock and the really, really big one at midnight," Jones said. Jones said the harbour entertainment would include a floating "sea creature" parade.

The marine-life parade will see lanterns some three-stories high, made from a steel and bamboo frame, covered in silk and illuminated from the inside. In the shape of dolphins, sharks, blue- ringed octopuses and the rare crustacean, squilla, the lanterns will circle the harbour from dusk and at 11.30 will come together under the Harbour Bridge to perform a 'ballet'.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Philharmonic Choir will perform at Bennelong Point from 11.30pm and some "surprise" performers ­ tipped to be a cross-section of Australian singers from popular to classical music ­ will take us into the New Year. The midnight fireworks show will be set to a background of music including a 2-minute "history of pop.

Massive pyrotechnics "choreographed" between the Harbour Bridge and the four barges will explode at midnight, with simultaneous fireworks at Darling Harbour. Organizers boast that Sydney is one of the few places that can fire the biggest firework in the world ­ which is the 24-inch shell. The number of city rooftop firings will be increased from four to eight and 10 pontoons will be under the bridge firing giant Roman candles.

"We're lucky we're in the middle of summer (for New Year's Eve) and we've got this wonderful harbour," Sartor said. "So we can do things with fireworks that cities like New York and London can't do." Jones said the event would be the biggest fireworks display in the world.

The night's events would cost more than $5 million but about two thirds of the funding was coming from corporate sponsorship.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald / The Australian News Network

DATE: 7/06/99

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