LAKEWOOD — Use of illegal fireworks has become an issue in the village of Lakewood recently, following an increase of incidents in the city of Jamestown.

The issue was raised at a meeting Monday of the Lakewood Village Board, and Lakewood-Busti Police Chief John Bentley confirmed Tuesday that fireworks have become more common.

Bentley relayed a personal story, when he noticed an increase in the apparent use of illegal fireworks while visiting his aunt.

“We’re seeing a lot more fireworks incidents than we did before,” Bentley said. “She was out on the lakefront over by Driftwood. As soon as it got a little bit dark out it sounded almost like it was kind of a mild shooting war going on out there. With big firecrackers and some small ones going off in rapid succession almost like you would hear a gun firing.”

This week, Lakewood-Busti police had a local rental property owner drop off a large cache of fireworks at the station, which Bentley said had been left by visitors from Ohio.

“It had to be $2,500 worth of mortars to fire. It was a huge amount,” Bentley said. “Like I always tell everybody, leave the fireworks to the people who do it all the time, the people who are the experts. They are dangerous. It never fails, every year somebody gets a finger blown off or loses their hand or whatever, loses an eye. It never fails, somebody gets hurt. The emergency rooms get real busy as the Fourth of July comes closer.”

Reid Sorensen, who resides on West Summit Avenue, mentioned the fireworks problem to the village board as it pertains to combat veterans.

“My wife and I are both veterans from the Air Force. She had actually been over in Kuwait when there were air raid sirens and stuff that had gone off,” Sorensen said. “She has struggled in the past couple of years. We do have a sign out front that does say that a combat veteran lives here. There are houses between us and the center of Lakewood that have a seeming disregard for the fact that there is a fireworks ban in effect.”

“There’s ones that are just a few houses down from us that are quite sizeable.”

The board recommended that residents report fireworks use as soon as possible, but even then it can be a difficult problem to address.

“To say we are going to send the patrols around to every call, it is difficult,” Bentley said. “The fireworks go off, the police car shows up, everybody is hiding inside or they all run away. Once in a while we will catch somebody, we will issue an appearance ticket. But there are a lot of people who just go right back to doing it again.”

Refraining from using illegal fireworks out of consideration for one’s neighbors may be the best approach.

“The bigger problem that we have here is that when they do go off it is quite unsettling these days for my wife,” Sorensen said. “Based on the fact that it brings her back to when she was serving in the military.”

Last week, the Jamestown Police Department stated that officers had already responded to 65 fireworks complaints in June. The department received only 31 compaliants of fireworks in the same month last year.