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San Diego's Fireworks Show Over In 15 Seconds
First time accepted submitter fotoguzzi writes "Garden State Fireworks is investigating how the entire Fourth of July show was launched after a signal was sent to the barges that would set the timing for the rest of the show after the introduction. Can anyone suggest how such a trivial step could go so disastrously wrong?" It's not the first time such a thing has happened, either.
But what an awesome 15 seconds that must have been!
One possibility is that the show was run by SMPTE timecode and someone mistakenly either started the code at a late point in the show causing the firing system to "catch up". Another possibility is the timecode was played back at fast forward instead of normal speed.
Maybe the timings were in milliseconds instead of seconds (or a new version of the software suddenly thought they were). Now, 30 minutes of fireworks gets done in 1.8 seconds. But since fuses take a couple seconds and some are longer than others, you get a total of 15 seconds.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
When I was in college I saw something similar. It was a sticky hot 4th of July evening. Just as the show was starting a big thunderstorm moved in. When they shot the first couple of rockets up, big flashes of lightning arced through the clouds in response. It was pretty impressive. They decided to shoot everything off at once, one after another; fireworks, thunder claps, lightning, all at once. It was totally awesome. Then it started to rain and all the braless coeds in tee-shirts had to walk back to campus. One of the better displays I've ever seen.
Not always. Most customers (the folks who pay for the shows) want the longest show for the least money. I've worked show where we were launching one shell every three seconds in order to meet the show duration requested by the customer. Think this turned a nice 5 minute show into a painful 30 minute experience.
How does is not get better as the time reduces?
As time reduces you approach what we call a sky puke. Okay it's a lotta boom but, you really don't get to see much.
I have designed the electronics and software of a fireworks firing system for a company that does regular shows here in Catalonia/Spain.
Believe me, experienced people are very cautious in everything they do, but unexperienced people can make big mistakes if they are overconfident in a black box system that will do everything for them.
In one point specifications said:
-The firing system must make an autotest for each circuit for the team to check all connections are in place.
They test the firing circuits of the fireworks several times before the show to fire all the material. In our case it was done exciting the fuses (sorry I'm not native english) with a safe very low current to see if the fuse is electrically present, and the inspections does a check of a circuit every 0.05s, so you can check the entire show in a few seconds.
For me this seems the check was done with full current on the circuits which fired all the fireworks during this test procedure.
It's quite surprising to have someone design a system that lets this happen from my point of view, in our case we made the circuits impossible (due hardware to redundant hardware switches and circuits) to excite to fire during the test (there are various physical limiter).
So... it seems someone who had not enought experience with fireworks managed to build his system and convince this people to use it... but its surprising, it's a pretty conservative people, at least the ones I know.
Agree on this. This is a test procedure with firing currents instead of test currents.
I designed the electrical and sofware part of a Firing System, and the matches needed much more than 100mA to fire, the 5mA seems on the test range.
In our case our circuit tested the whole show in just a few seconds like this (each match every 0.05 or 0.1s). So if firing current (>>100mA) was applied a faulty test would do this.
But because of this (this is also an economical disaster for the company), the test procedure is hardware forced with low current, with redundant circuits that block that disable the firing current by two or more ways by different systems, that means, that software and hardware must enable the fire.
As this fired at the three places at the same time, this seems a completely software plattform with no apparent HW securities... bad idea.
My sentiment exactly, Ordinarily I would refuse to sit in traffic and get all bunched up with lake people and their little cracker spawn for some shitty fireworks show.
Now, if they would have said, "This year, we shoot the whole god dammed thing at once, just to see what it looks like". I would have driven to San Diego.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Depends on your pyrotechnics people. When I lived there Traverse City, MI, used to go withe the lowest bidder for their Cherry Festival fireworks. We lived two blocks from the National Maritime Academy pier where they launch from, and would walk down and watch the fireworks from the park there. In either '95 or '94 the bozos they had contracted somehow trashed their control board and proceeded to run the whole program by hand. This consisted in a guy walking up and down the pier with a FLARE setting off random fireworks in no particular order.
This was amusing to watch, and even more amusing to hear the idiots nearby commenting on how wonderfully they were choreagraphing the fireworks to the radio station they were listening to, until all of a sudden the guy tossed his flare in the water, covered his head and ran like hell. A few seconds later one of the larger shells went off **in the mortar**, showering us with sparks and setting off a dozen or more fireworks at once. That turned out to be our "finale", except for those of us who were close enough to the company's trailer and got to listen to the worker tell his bosses to go fuck themselves because he was NOT going back out on that dock with another flare.
I think they've abandoned the lowest bidder habit, at least for the fireworks display.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin