City Fines Homeowner $300,000 After Using Drone to Spot Illegal Fireworks

A week after Fourth of July celebrations, PetaPixel reported that multiple California police departments had used drones to surveil and spot people illegally shooting off fireworks. Promised fines have been rolling out since, including a new $300,000 one levied against an Orange County homeowner who claims they were not even home on July 4.

“I wasn’t even home,” says a Stanton, California homeowner who was fined $300,00 last week by Stanton police, FOX 11 Los Angeles reports. City officials claim they recorded approximately 300 illegal fireworks explosions at the fined man’s home on July 4, 2025. The homeowner says the city’s video doesn’t “prove anything.”

“One thousand dollars for each explosion,” says Stanton Mayor David Shawver, who added that the city warned residents months before July 4 of potential fines.

In nearby Riverside, California, just over 40 miles down CA-91 from Stanton, officials fined fireworks violators for up to $1,500 per violation. In Sacramento, fireworks violations carry escalating fines: $1,000 for the first, $2,500 for the second, and $5,000 per explosion thereafter. The heavily fined Stanton homeowner, who maintains his innocence, would have been fined around $1,500,000 for the alleged violations had they occurred in Sacramento.

This Stanton homeowner was one of 18 homeowners in the city who were fined a combined total of nearly one million dollars as part of the community’s drone-assisted fireworks crackdown. FOX 11 reports that all of the fined homeowners are planning to fight the fines.

The city chose to make the homeowner responsible for fireworks violations, not the individual who may have set them off, which opens the possibility that renters could cause a massive, expensive headache for property owners, particularly those who own multi-family dwellings or apartment buildings.

“What we did is we made the property owner responsible for illegal activity on their property,” says Shawver.

While these fines for fireworks may seem exorbitant to many, California takes illegal fireworks very seriously, given the significant wildfire risks that they pose. California has famously experienced many devastating wildfires in recent years, including fires in and around Los Angeles at the beginning of this year, which veteran photojournalist and wildfire photographer David Swanson called the worst he’d ever seen.

Fireworks are also dangerous when improperly handled. In Buena Park, California, just a few miles from Stanton, an eight-year-old girl was tragically killed by an explosion caused by illegal fireworks this past July. Buena Park now hopes to launch its own drone-based fireworks surveillance program.

Despite handing out nearly $1 million in fines to people who allegedly used illegal fireworks on July 4, Stanton officials say the drones are not planned for use on New Year’s Eve, another hotbed holiday for fireworks. Stanton officials add that its drones are used exclusively for the city’s fireworks surveillance program, not for broader law enforcement efforts.

Image credits: Featured photo is a screenshot of Stanton, California, drone footage from July 4, 2025