I was up on my office's rooftop overlooking the National Mall. We got there a bit after 5:00 PM when the weather was hot and sunny. We had a great view of all the military aircraft flyovers. We saw a B-2, a B-52, an F/A-18, the F-16's flown by the USAF Thunderbirds who put on a lengthy show. At one point there was a single F-35 that just flew around the national mall for a bit showing off what it could do, occasionally lighting the afterburner. Air Force One flew over the Mall too, with F-35 escorts.
The evening took a turn at 7:38 PM. That's when there was supposed to be a flyover by stealth fighters: I assume a mix of F-35s and F-22s, the latter of which had not yet made an appearance. But they didn't show up. In fact, none of the airplanes scheduled for after 7:38 PM showed up. Off in the distance, we could see thunder striking various parts of Maryland and Virginia.
It was going to rain.
Those of us up on the balcony could only rely on Twitter, where people were reporting all sorts of chaos on the mall below. The National Mall was being evacuated, the flyovers were cancelled, some accounts were even reporting that the fireworks themselves were cancelled.
It took a while for the storm to actually hit the District of Columbia, around 9:30, and it arrived as light rain. But somebody on Twitter said that there was lightning within 6 miles of the Mall, which is all that was needed to shut it down. Eventually, rumors emerged that the President would speak at 11:00 PM and the fireworks would come right after that.
I don't know how we made it to 11:00 PM, we were incredibly bored and tired. Of course then we had an entire speech to sit through. The President took the stage about 17 minutes late, it was conspicuous that all of the singers on stage before him sang their songs two or three times. I had hoped that he would conclude his remarks quickly, but since his speech involved a lot of thanking old veterans who were in the audience and had presumably come out just for this, it wasn't especially conducive to shortening. He spoke until around 11:55 PM.
The fireworks began at 11:59 PM when a B-1 nuclear bomber flew over the National Mall with its afterburner on. The President said that this would break the Guiness World Record for world's largest fireworks show and I believe it. It was incredible. They shot an enormous amount of fireworks up into the sky over the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial and they occasionally punctuated it with tons of low-elevation fireworks coming up from the Mall. From our vantage point it looked like the Mall was being consumed by red, white, and blue flames. During the 39 minutes of the fireworks display, there were frequent moments of premature applause when the audience assumed a particularly intense moment must have been the grand finale, but they kept going bigger.
As for those thunderstorms, they were still striking parts of Maryland and Virginia. So frequently during the fireworks show, the man-made fireworks were supplemented by thunderbolts in the sky. It was as if the heavens themselves were joining in the celebration of our glorious republic. I'll never forget the sight of those thunderbolts behind the fireworks. Terrible swift sword.
