• Tons of food generated by the Waterfront Blues Festival to benefit Oregon Food Bank since the festival started in 1988: 800
• Amount raised in last year’s Waterfront Blues festival: $1.3 million
• Number of meals they could buy with that money (estimate): 3.9 million
• Pounds of fireworks purchased in the US each year: About 200 million.
• Annual revenue by fireworks industry: $940 million
• Number of fires caused by fireworks in the Portland area between 2009 and 2013: 773
• Amount in property damaged caused by fireworks in that same period: $5 million
• Estimated number of people who eat out of an emergency food box every month in Oregon and Clark County: 240,000
• Number of bird species that live in or migrate through the Columbia Slough: 175
• Number of Railcars that move through the Columbia Slough annually: 250,000
• Number of years the Department of Environmental Quality predicts it will take before the Willamette River has low enough mercury levels for the resident fish to be safe to eat: 50 to 100
• Number of miles of the Columbia River that violate quality standards for arsenic: up to 150 (out of 306)
Sources: Waterfront Blues Festival, American Pyrotechnics Association/National Council on Firework Safety, American Pyrotechnics Association, Oregon.gov, Oregon Food Bank, Columbia Slough Watershed Council; Oregonian, Clean Air Council; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Department of Environmental Quality;
This article appears in 2014-07-04.