By Daniel Macht
Click here for updates on this story
ESPARTO, California (KCRA) — Top Yolo County officials were aware of illegal fireworks operations at the site of the deadly 2025 Esparto explosions for at least three years but “no code enforcement occurred” and the lack of oversight directly led to “death and destruction,” according to a civil grand jury report.
The Yolo County Civil Grand Jury released the damning 32-page report, titled “Esparto Fireworks Explosion: Officials Knew, None Acted, ” on Thursday.
“Inexplicably, no code enforcement occurred, even though all dangerous fireworks had been banned by ordinance throughout rural Yolo County since 2001,” the report said. “In the absence of official oversight and enforcement, unmitigated expansion of the fireworks businesses operating at the site in Esparto led directly to death and destruction from the Esparto Fireworks Explosion.”
The report said the goal of the investigation was to understand the failure of the county’s code enforcement process.
Multiple fireworks blasts on July 1, 2025, obliterated a facility that was storing a massive cache of fireworks, killing seven workers from Devastating Pyrotechnics and leaving only debris behind.
The Civil Grand Jury is an independent body of citizen volunteers who are appointed to provide oversight of local government operations.
“The Board of Supervisors respectfully disagrees with the report’s suggestion that the County does not take code enforcement seriously,” Yolo County said in a statement about the grand jury’s finding. “While funding levels have varied historically, the Board has consistently supported and funded the County’s code enforcement program in recent (compared to previous) years and continues to recognize the essential role it plays in protecting community health and safety. Consistent with this commitment, the County has initiated internal reviews of its processes, including code enforcement procedures, and continues to work closely with local fire agencies and regional partners to strengthen coordination and communication.”
Other investigations have also been underway. Cal Fire’s state fire marshal said in February that it found signs of criminal activity and turned its findings over to the DA’s office.
Since the explosions, the state marshal’s office revoked the pyrotechnics licenses for two companies that operated at the Esparto site, determining that they had violated state fireworks laws and regulations.
In December, CAL/OSHA issued more than $200,000 in fines through 15 citations, three of which were noted to have been serious regulatory violations that the agency said were directly related to the deadly explosions.
A closer look at findings from the grand jury’s report
The grandy jury report notes that the Esparto explosion site had once belonged to a farmer, Jerry Matsumura, who used to put on fireworks displays.
But activity at the property evolved after his 2015 death into a “substantial business” called Devastating Pyrotechnics that went on to provide fireworks for shows across the state.
The report notes that Matsumura’s two daughters, Rieko Matsumura and Tammy Machado, took over the property and worked at the sheriff’s office. Machado’s husband, Sam Machado, worked as a lieutenant at the office.
Over the years, the owner of Devastating Pyrotechnics, Kenneth Chee, expanded his business at the Machados’ property and brought on additional containers to hold explosives, the report said.
While Devastating Fireworks obtained federal and state permits, it did not have a local use permit or business license, the report notes. And ordinances prohibited fireworks businesses anywhere in the county.
The report found that as part of the businesses’ expansion, it represented during the permitting process that it planned to store almonds.
“The report is unusual in the respect that we could not pinpoint the very thing that happened,” said Richard Zeiger, foreperson of the Yolo County Civil Grand Jury. “There is a whole list of things that we think might have contributed to it. One is this sort of atmosphere that you should be tolerant of activities that are taking place on farmlands, not look at them too closely. Other aspects have to do with just procedures that are used by the code enforcement people and the adequacy of those, and the tracking problems that occur with them.”
Around the same time in 2021, a Devastating Pyrotechnics employee who lived on the Machado property, Craig Cutright, also contacted planning division workers to see if he could establish a new fireworks business nearby.
Cutright, a volunteer firefighter for the Esparto Fire District, later started his own business Blackstar Fireworks on the Machado property.
Email says inspection will ‘tread lightly’
The report says that on June 2, 2022, a tipster told a County Building Services department official that the Machados’ property was being used by two pyrotechnics businesses.
County Building Services staff said in emails about an inspection that they would “tread lightly” because the property was owned by sheriff’s deputies “including deputies that we work with.”
KCRA 3 Investigates previously reported that Yolo County officials were aware of the red flags after we obtained the emails from a public records request.
The report says that building officials confirmed there were pyrotechnic businesses operating at the site but that Esparto fire officials said they were approved by the ATF and the site was storing “safe and sane” and dangerous fireworks. The staff were also told the new building would be used for agricultural purposes.
“Following the site visit, the County Community Services Department took steps toward a possible enforcement action against the property,” the report says. “But within days, this conversation about the site – at least in email records provided by the County – abruptly ceased. The department failed to take any action, and the fireworks business continued to quietly operate and even expand.”
The grand jury said it could not determine why planning and code enforcement staff never pursued the matter.
“There were times they’d been out on the property, they talked to property owners, and they knew something was happening there, and they just failed to do this, but this was a long time before the actual explosion. At the time they looked, the operations were smaller, and there was sort of a long history of the owner of that farm as a kind of super hobby of setting off fireworks,” Zeiger told KCRA.
The report explains several possible reasons why no one took action.
They included:
Officials may not have realized the operations they saw while inspecting a new building, given long-standing use of the property for a small-scale pyrotechnics business. Miscommunication over whether an enforcement letter had been sent with some workers thinking it had been. County officials thinking that state and federal officials were responsible for monitoring the businesses. (The grand jury did not find a record that Cal Fire inspected the property or whether the county had checked with the agencies.) The county’s building and code enforcement divisions were understaffed with a backlog and had no process of what actions to prioritize. The grand jury heard that code enforcement had been a low priority by the Board of Supervisors. It was possible that many in the community thought the business was an asset by providing employment and donating fireworks to fundraising shows for the local fire district.
“Whatever the cause – and the lack of subsequent documentation remains a significant concern to the Grand Jury – in the years after the new structure was completed in 2023, it appears that the pyrotechnic business activities continued at the site and, with the new building in place, greatly increased,” the report says.
The grand jury also found that since the explosions the county hasn’t “engaged in any sort of thorough or systematic review of its own processes or procedures.”
In all, the grand jury report found that nearly a dozen county employees over the years knew about the pyrotechnics operations but failed to take “any remedial action.”
“We think people failed and the system failed. There were a lot of people that knew about this. If one of them had stood up and said, ‘Wait, you can’t do this, there’s a danger,’ I think that might have stopped. No one did,” Zeiger said.
Board of Supervisors faulted
The report also faults the Board of Supervisors after hearing testimony that it “fostered a culture of tolerance for code violations.”
“Combined with the fact that the property was owned by officials who worked for the Sheriff’s Office, this approach seems to have contributed toward employees turning a blind eye toward a violation that eventually allowed an illegal business to expand and ultimately resulted in the death of seven people, destruction of the residential and commercial buildings on site, a 78-acre fire and damage to residences, buildings, and agricultural acreage on surrounding properties,” the report says.
Meanwhile, families of the victims have said they would sue government entities and individuals. A press release alleged that state and county employees “turned a blind eye due to a culture where friends are not subjected to the same oversight as the rest of us.”
Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
