Yeah, I need to watch it. I wasn’t saying it was the case that someone was screwing around...they way they worded that seemed odd to me and made me suspicious.
I had four memorable incidents with “exploding things” in my life.
When I was 10, living on the Navy base at Yokosuka, I was down near the IJN Mikasa getting ready to sneak off base (you could get through the fence there) and while waiting for no one to see me, and bunch of Japanese kids appeared on the other side of the fence, and soon we were lighting firecrackers and flinging them over the top at each other. I tried to “cook” a firecracker (not a big one, just one of the little ones) and let the fuse burn down before I threw it over. When I reared back to throw it, it went off in my hand right next to my right ear. It resulted in painful ringing and I couldn’t hear a thing out of it for a while. I have awful tinnitus now, and I always thought that firecracker contributed to it. (That or sitting eleven rows from the stage speakers at a Blue Oyster Cult concert some years later!)
Then, when I was fourteen living on a Navy Communications station just a few miles from Andrews AFB, they put on a 4th of July fireworks show, and the sailors working the detail set up the launch site about 50 yards from the picnic area (LOL) which meant dozens of us walked even closer, and we were probably 30 yards away on a shallow hill, looking at the stacked fireworks and the two fire trucks parked next to them. They had a sailor working the detail who everyone (including families and kids) knew this sailor was a chronic f*ck-up and brig rat type. He wasn’t an evil guy, he just could not keep out of trouble. Anyway, they had him preparing to light off the fireworks with a traffic flare. (LOL) As we all watched, we saw a sudden flurry of activity. People began running around in little circles and we saw sailors pulling fireworks off the stack and tossing them, when EVERYBODY began running away, the sailors, the firemen, and the spectators! The whole thing went up all at once and completely destroyed one of the fire engines parked next to it. It was charred and black, and had holes in it. My dad later told me the sailor with the traffic flare had lit the flare with that little piece of emory cloth, which he caught on fire and he tossed it on the ground. The grass caught fire followed by the stack of fireworks, IIRC. It was spectacular once I stopped running! I have to laugh thinking of it-nobody would EVER do it like that today...
Back in the Eighties, we had a friend who worked for the city, and he pulled a few strings to let us drive our car up to the top of a hill where they were launching the fireworks, so we would get a bird’s eye view. I remember there ended up being five or six carloads of us up there, and they were launching the fireworks close by, and our view of them going off was grand. One of them (a starburst, I recall) took off, but instead of going “SHHH HHH HHHH HHHH H H HHH HH HHH HHH HHH HHH H HHH BOOOOOM!” It went “SHHHH HH HH BOOOM!” These things that looked like huge flaming coffee cans were hitting the asphalt all around us bouncing, trailing flames and exploding! I watched transfixed for a second or two, then came to my senses and dove under a parked car...everyone else was doing the same! Heh, nobody got hurt, but someone who was higher up the chain than my friend came over and kicked everyone off the hill! We didn’t argue...:)
Then, when I was in my late twenties, I went car-camping with a bunch of people, and there is a lot of drinking and fire involved. We were all having a good time in mid-afternoon, consuming lots of adult beverages, and my buddy went into the big tent to take a catnap. Then there was an explosion from the fire pit. One of the guys had put an unopened jar of some kind on fire grate, and when it cooked off, glass went everywhere, leaving holes in the tarp and just missing the big tent (and the rest of us) My buddy came storming out of the tent madder than a hornet, while the guy who put the jar there laughed. Well, he was one of those people you couldn’t stay angry with for very long, but I am sure glad nobody was hit by glass shrapnel.
Had a friend who put on fireworks shows for a local baseball team. Always wore a shirt covered with burn holes. Called it his ‘lucky shirt’. Yeah, boy.