Tourists, East Bay families, and assorted San Franciscans flocked to the Embarcadero Tuesday night to see if this year might be the exception in which the fireworks aren't shot into a fog bank that half obscures the show. But no! That is exactly what happened again as you can see in the video below as the ever-reliable chill and Karl invasion arrived on schedule over the weekend, and made sure to dampen the festivities just a bit.

But the show must go on, and ABC 7 reports that "tens of thousands" of people showed up anyway, because hey, it's the Fourth of July! And unless you had an easy way to watch fireworks somewhere else — Sonoma always puts on a great show, for instance, and the Shoreline Amphitheater show in Mountain View is another big one — you couldn't miss out and completely, and a show's a show.

For the in-the-know and brave, you didn't have to leave the neighborhoods of the Mission or Lower Haight to see a great, grassroots show that lasted for hours, with car trunk-fuls of illegal fireworks being set off in the middle of the street, and from rooftops, sometimes under the watchful, beleaguered eye of SFPD officers — I at least witnessed about a dozen cops who made their presence known around Haight Street, and even helped close the street to car and bus traffic at one point, but mostly just let the whole thing happen.

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Hopefully nobody hurt themselves too badly.

#lowerhaight goes off! #fourthofjuly #fireworks #haight #sf #sfstyle

A post shared by Jay Barmann (@conflator) on