20 replies to this topic

[PyroBrit]

Well that's fair enough. Just being curious.
Unfortunately the worlds press have climbed onto the San Diego incident. Granted it doesn't require an official report etc but the initial press release from the Firework Company said "computer glitch".
As I work in the computer industry, that kind of remark annoys me. Some IT websites are already questioning what they mean by computer glitch. And of course it can mean many things: hardware failure? Mouse button slip? Damp? Power spike? Virus?
As you mention, both incidents were in human disaster terms "harmless", and both incidents have caused people to talk about the displays far longer than if they fired normally. In the long term this initial negative publicity can be turned around. Oban produced the winterfest and Pyro1 did a great display which again was reported worldwide. Garden Fireworks has offered to fire a future event free. The city will fill its hotels a second time and the eyes of the world will watch a big display. San Diego would be crazy not to agree.
Take Plymouth and the British Champs hosted every year. Plymouth would be crazy to lose the tender for that event That's 50,000 persons visiting a city and spending money on two nights that would probably just be two normal empty weekday nights. How much income does that bring in to the city for such a small spend?
Of all the things that happened on the 4th. One that took me by surprise was the hatred and vitriol in online social networks (twitter, Facebook, etc) against the San Diago organisers and to other human beings in the street. It almost seemed to be at riot levels.
Still systems fail all the time.I have personally watched a very popular firing system be powered on only for the internal circuit board to burn out and release it's magic blue smoke.Worse still I have seen a module that failed in a show fire it's entire pod of 32 igniters 5 minutes after the display has finished.
For myself, I can only check my firing and setup procedures again. Have I covered every way of setup to firing to cleanup. Test, test and test again.

[PyroBrit]

And at the end the latest press statement released yesterday says an "unintentional additional procedural step," was the cause. The Fire One fired correctly doing what it was told.
It was all down to preparing the firing script and adding a backup script to fire the show in case the primary communication line went down.
It's a good statement in the way it is written as it absolves Fire One from any blame and also that the computers and other hardware were also not to blame.
See new HD vid (loud). HD San Diego Big Bang
Link to new statement Just a mistake

[pyrotrev]

Just read that paper's report, didn't altogether seem very convincing to me! But there again that might be down to the journo trying to describe something in simple terms that would be obvious if you had the files open on your computer. However I do agree with PDC that even just having the option to put a warning in place (a small popup would do) when the show is below a certain time would seem to make enormous sense.

[Arthur Brown]

The big problem here is that no-one chatting in this thread was there at the time. So we only have a couple of remote journalists opinions of their view of the facts.

Vague guesses of mine range from finger trouble to failure of the firing computer to correctly interpret a file written on the office computer. It's also a very slight possibility that the Oban show issue and this USA show issue may be related to some rare event in the software BUT realistically it should have shown many more times by now if there was an issue.

[scjb]

Oban was human error, not software or hardware. If I had to bet on the cause of San Diego...

[Arthur Brown]

As the years progress the worlds press can report and comment on more things as increasing numbers of events are recorded on mobile phones and shared with the world on the web.

As a guess, there may even be a newshound's web tool to scan new youtube titles for interesting stories.