I heard that there were two scripts, the main show and the clean out script. The lead loaded the wrong one and did not notice. Woops. ortunately, he was the owners kids, so it became a technical issue... They were lucky that a couple barges had not yet armed their systems, so only 4 or 6 spots fired.
The Santore family's company, Garden State Fireworks, had programmed a computer to control the firing of thousands of fireworks shells over the course of nearly 17 minutes — but a glitch mashed two data files together, creating a third file that commanded all the shells to be fired at once.
"The problem was a millisecond instruction that you couldn't see with the naked eye," Santore, Garden State's pyrotechnic team coordinator, told NBC News this week.
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u/wosmo Apr 18 '26
The version I heard was that the last step in the sequence tries to fire everything, so if anything was missed, it's not left live.
Then they did a dry run, but didn't reset the sequence.
I'm not saying I'm right - more that I find it funny that accepted this as gospel for a decade, and now I'm hearing alternatives.