17 February 2023
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Thousands of Kansas City Chiefs fans celebrated the team’s second Super Bowl Championship in just three years at a parade and rally Wednesday. It’s the team’s third overall Super Bowl win.
Championship parades are nothing new in Kansas City with the Royals’ World Series win in 2015 and the Chiefs’ Super Bowl wins in 2020 and 2023.
Some of the planning, such as coordinating the confetti, for these type of events happen weeks in advance.
One company in Kansas City, Kansas is well experienced now in making that happen.
Visual FX has been in business for 22 years supplying special effects for events including confetti, lasers, balloon drops, snow machines, fog machines and video.
Owner Larry Sprang says he has been doing live production for over 40 years.
Sprang said they started planning about three weeks before the event and had to order the confetti as soon as the Chiefs won the AFC Championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals in order to get that amount of production time.
“We spent the entire two weeks before the big game prepping the machines, trucks and schedules to pull this off,” he said. “What a great event.”
Sprang said Wednesday’s parade used 1,000 pounds of confetti between the starting line area, the four trucks in the parade route, and the rally at Union Station.
The building that is home to VFX and Sprang is pretty interesting in itself. The building served as Station 6 for the Kansas City, Kansas Fire Department from around 1930 to 1989, according to the Historical Society of KCKFD.
Station 6 served the Armourdale community until the time of its closure. Armourdale’s population had decreased, and with advancements in fire protection it was no longer needed to cover the area in the same manner.
A new Station 6 was built in 2001 near Kansas Speedway and is the only other KCKFD station other than KCKFD Headquarters to have a training area.