In 1973 I lived at NAVCOMMSTA Cheltenham in Maryland, and they were going to have a big fireworks show on the base for the 4th of July. (This was a very small communications base just a couple of miles from Andrews AFB.
So, they had a couple of fire trucks parked bow to stern, and about 20 feet of stacked fireworks.
The was a sailor (I remember his name was Latrell because everyone was talking about him afterwards) who had a traffic flare that he was lighting to use to light fireworks. The little emory cloth thing that lit the flare caught on fire, and he just dropped it, and apparently it got blown by a gust onto the stack of fireworks.
I was sitting on a hillside probably 40 yards away (They did things differently back then) when I noticed a commotion around the fireworks stack. Latrell was bent over the stack throwing fireworks, and people were running around.
The whole thing went up at once, it was all done in probably 15-30 seconds as I recall, amazingly, nobody was hurt. I remember one of the base fire trucks looked like it had been attacked by machine guns and RPGS. It was completely blackened and charred, had big and small craters and holes.
That sounds like it was crazy.
Nothing like watching professional fireworks being lit not the way they were supposed to be...