The Big Bay Boom Independence Day Disaster of 2012 | Episode 53

People have asked, of all the disasters in history, if I could travel back in time to witness any of them, which would I choose. Well, I've never been able to answer that question before until today's episode. Hello and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, there will be no death, there will be no dismemberment, and the only blood will be coming out of people's ears. This is a one of a kind minisode celebrating the greatest display of patriotic fury of all time. This is not normally the show that you play around kids, or walk eating or even a mixed company, But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Who doesn't love fireworks, bonfires and barbecues? Well, I mean, I know that animals hate fireworks, and asthmatics don't love bonfires and barbecues. So you ever get hooked by the nostrils by a visible trail of meat smoke and it just kind of lulls you along, YadA YadA YadA. Next thing you know, you fast forward and now you've got grill marks on your hands. Well, I'm not doing a safety segment on that, at least not yet. Now we are here for the fourth of July, Happy Firth Day America and the Philippines. We're always looking for the most bizarre and inspiring stories for the show, and today's will be particularly onspiring. Obviously, we're heading to Coney Island to watch the gastrotastrophe of the world famous Nathan's Annual hot dog eating contest. Just imagine the sphincter control and strain these athletes put on their bodies. But no, we're not spending an hour on the subway all the way out to Coney Island just to watch people throw up. In fact, we're going to skip all the way over to the opposite corner of the country. Grab your American flag, stretch pants, a lawn chair, and be ready to squeeze out at least one very special patriotic tier. We're leaving the beach needles and water down hot dog buns behind for a city with a world class bay and more dog friendly restaurants than anywhere else. Yeah, I pretty much just gave it away. That's right. We are heading to San Diego, California. So are we celebrating the fourth with a salmon moose for dogs? Jesus with these food options? No, No, we are here for fireworks. Yeah. Fireworks, or at least the gunpowder needed to make them so lively, was discovered thousands of years ago. But in the sixteenth century, fireworks as we think of them, you will be happy to learn were discovered by accident. If there's anything better than an accidental discovery story, it's an inventor killed by their own invention story, and this story has both. According to legend, a Chinese cook named one Who attached tubes of gunpowder to a chair in hopes of achieving the long sought after dream of human flight. When the rockets were ignited, they exploded, creating a loud noise and a display of colorful sparks. And when the smoke cleared, one Who and his rocket chair were gone. Once everyone cleared all the blood out of their eyes, they knew they really had something. And fireworks traveled the world, and within a thousand years it had become the go to choice for royal weddings, coronations, military victories, you know, the a list kind of stuff. And if you've ever wondered about the connection between July fourth and blowing stuff up, you can thank John Adams. He was one of the founding fathers and the second President of the United States, and like most proud parents, he wanted to make a really big deal about America's first birthday. Adams wanted it to be celebrated with pomp and parades and sports and guns and bells and bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other. And illuminations wasn't a reference to some kind of psychedelic meat or anything. No, of course, he meant fireworks. And today you can have fireworks, and you can have the Fourth of July, but you simply cannot have one without the other. But what was all that about San Diego having a bay? Thanks for reminding me. San Diego Bay is a picturesque waterfront beloved by tourists and locals alike for its natural beauty and maritime history. It's probably most famous for hosting the annual Fleetwek celebration, where spectators take in all the US military has to offer at sea while robatic military aircraft maneuver and showoff high above. But we're not here for Fleetweek. Just like every lake in bay across America, if you can claw and chew your way to the shore of it, you're gonna see fireworks above it, and San Diego's Bay is no different. He got smatterings here and there that really contribute to with this incomplete ring of joy. The only real game took place over in Glorietta Bay from the city of Coronado. HP Sandy Perdon was the owner of the Shelter Cove Marina and a longtime resident of the San Diego Port District. He'd taken his boat out to Glorietta Bay to take in their fireworks show one year, and he had to struggle to squeeze in between all the boats, and then he had to squint to see through all the sales, and he thought, God, if there has to be a better way. He'd been chairman of the Port Tenants Association in the mid nineties, which meant he knew business owners and managers all around the bay, hotels, restaurants, marinas, shipyards, you name it. And his thinking was, if we fireworks show on the San Diego side of the Bay on July fourth, the local businesses whould benefit. After all, the bay was a natural amphitheater. It was a perfect location. So he recruited financial support from other bayside business owners, including the Port of San Diego itself. The San Diego Port District came on board with a title sponsorship, a financial support for traffic control, portable toilets Harbor police, while production administration, permitting, technical oversight, television and radio production, development, fundraising, and overall control of the event fell to Sandy Perdon. He became the executive producer of the event that would come to be known as the Big Bay Boom. Oh. Yes, it was a whole thing. The sponsors contributed about three hundred and eighty thousand dollars to pay for the fireworks, the barges, the tugs, permits, publicity buses, etc. And Perdon decided early on that the event did not need to turn a profit. He wanted any surplus to be given back in some way, and that's when he learned of the San Diego Armed Services YMCA. They had over forty programs to help military families, and since two thousand and one it has received over four hundred thousand dollars from the Big Bay Boom. As the years went on, the event grew. There were three barges in two thousand and four and four and two thousand and five. They were set up off Shelter Island, Harbor Island, and North and South Embarcadero, and in two thousand and ten the Imperial Beach Pier was added as a fifth location. The Big Bay Boom became one of the largest annual fireworks displays in the country, and half a million people willing to try and find parking on a holiday in July couldn't be wrong. Hotel rooms facing the bay were sold out. Visitors from across California and neighboring Arizona planned their visit a year in advance, and they tend to suck up all the best restaurant or dinner cruise seats anything that faces the show. Really. Organizers promised that this year would be bigger and more intense than ever, and bringing a bang to the table was the Garden State fireworks company out of New Jersey, and they weren't goobers. These people had staged pyrotechnic displays for the nineteen eighty eight Winter Olympics, the Statue of Liberty, by Centennial Celebration and New Year's Eve in Central Park in New York. August Centauri Junior was in charge of the company. His great grandfather had started in Italy all the way back in eighteen ninety and in all that time, five generations of centauris not one finger lost. August Junior had been handling explosives since he was ten, so yeah, he was qualified. The Big Baboon was one of the most logistically complex displays in the world. To give you a sense of just how involved things were for a seventeen and a half minute fireworks show, Garden State had already put in thousands of hours of work. They'd been preparing for over nine months. According to Centauri, attendees, which is really just a funny way of saying, people with ears and eyes and not a fully obstructed view, they were going to see every firework imaginable, in his words, everything from a pulsing globe disco type thing to hearts to stars to rings, to cubes, to smiley faces, to giant weeping willows, to red, white and blue flying fish, screaming whistles, everything you can imagine. You don't even need to understand that sentence. It was going to be loud and it was going to be bright. Imagine rows of PVC cannons all lined up on barges one hundred and thirty five feet long and forty five feet wide. The fireworks themselves looked like coconuts, and they're wired to a computer station at one end of the barge where all the controls are, and the barge crews were all decked out in full fire suits, life jackets, hard hats, ear plugs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the bay, Perdin was busy holding a party to thank all the sponsors at his house overlooking the bay, while hundreds of thousands lined the bay waiting impatiently. Sentauri and Perdin were both in contact with the Coastguard, the harbor Police, and of course the tugboats and the barges, and as the clock hit nine Centauri sent a signal to start the firing sequence. The show had been designed to last seventeen and a half minutes, but immediately, a sudden burst of hundreds of fireworks shot into the air, all at once, creating a deep bass rumble that you could feel throughout downtown and every inch of the bay. All the pyrotechnics, four hundred thousand dollars worth of major firepower launched simultaneously. These massive barges jumped about six inches, scaring the ever loving crap out of everyone on board. None of the tug, barge or pyrotechnic crews had ever seen or heard anything like this. No one had seen anything like this. Workers on the barges leapt into metal safety shelters designed for their protection. One of the tug pilots said it reminded him of Vietnam. The show had become a relentless cascade of endless, overlapping explosions. Even in buildings across the bay, you could feel the concussion hit you right in the chest. These elositions created a huge mushroom of light, a massive white orb that turned night into day. Then, as fast as they came, the flashes stopped, and a massive cloud of spent gunpowder, smoke, and paper slowly and silently drifted across the sky. Oh yeah, it lasted thirty seconds. There were no reported injuries, but about seven seconds in the fire, Marshal's lower jaw fell off Onlookers stood in quiet disbelief, wondering what the hell they just watched, wondering what was to come next. They were lucky to still have retinas attached. Same with the barge crew. Radios burst to life, with crews asking what the fuck and waiting for something else to go off. Centauri responded that something went wrong and they'd run out of fireworks. Oh thank god, they thought. Then the debris started raining down on their heads. The music continued, but the show was over. There would be no encore. Meanwhile, backup Purdins sponsor party, all one hundred and thirty guests were staring holes through the back of his head. He said, I was trying to figure out which crack in the deck I could hide under. For the guests, imagine you just watched a small, elaborate nuke go off over the bay, and now the only one with any answers just excused himself to make the phone call. He calls Centauri on his cell to say Holy Centauri said, we're trying to figure out what happened, which for perdon. It was a little like being at a wedding and someone asks you to stall the ceremony for twenty minutes while they figure something out. Clearly something had gone wrong, and we do talk about schadenfreude a lot on this show. Now, imagine you're Sam Brugema, the owner operator of a local company called Pyro Spectaculars. They had run the show for the first nine years and as an expert in the field. When immediately asked for his reaction, he said, my phone blew up. Everybody thought I did it. Everybody thought it was me. I still haven't lived it down, and I'm not even the company that did it. It was non for the next two and a half hours. My phone never stopped ringing and my battery went dead. Then when I plugged it in again, I had like ninety seven messages. The Port of San Diego took to Twitter after the explosion to apologize for what it called a technical glitch and said event producers were investigating the cause. So your host just drunkenly mishandled fireworks and gave you the finger, literally just pirouetted through the air and into your cup. Would you know what to do? Hey? Kids, If Tommy has ten fingers and blows off seven fingers, how many fingers does he have left? Well, not enough to pick up the rest of those fingers. And that's the thing. The big issue with handling fireworks is handling fireworks, and history shows again and again that the people most eager to handle them are the people least capable of handling them. That is to say, statistically, at least half of people injured by the fourth July are drunk, and those people make up almost seventy percent of firework injuries for the year just on that one event. The black powder in fireworks burns at about four hundred and sixty four celsius or eight hundred and sixty seven fahrenheit. Combined with the force of the explosion, it's enough to quick fry and remove fingers, eyes, or genitals with ease, and now you have a finger in your drink. Well blame COVID. In twenty nineteen, a lot of places canceled their fireworks shows and displays, so they put the onus of blowing stuff up back into the consumer's hands unintended. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission found a fifty percent increase in deaths and injuries from fireworks related incidents between twenty twenty and twenty nineteen. At least eighteen people die from fireworks related incidents in twenty twenty, and another fifteen thousand, six hundred were treated in hospital emergency departments for fireworks injuries. Burns are the most common injury overall. Forty four percent of injuries involved the over application of fire to flesh. And on that note, I saw someone talking about adhesive bench dig in their burn kit. Do not apply anything with a word adhesive to burn skin. I once had to close a light wound with contractor tape was all that was available, but it sounded like velcro when it was taken back off a burn. Victim's not even gonna want fingerprints on burned skin. I best cover it loosely with a sterile, non stick dressing or a clean cloth to protect it from infection. Parts of the bodies most often injured where the hands and fingers, and that was thirty percent. The head and face and ears came int at twenty two percent, and eye injuries won the bronze prize at fifteen percent. If you're beside someone who appears to be flipping you the bird, but through tears. Instead of anger, stay calm and reassure them that they're going to be okay. It's essential to help manage the shock and the anxiety. The first thing most people try is reattachment. But instead of trying to reattach it, use it to call for an ambulance. Fingers and digits are not lego and I promise this is just not going to work. What does work is having the injured person keep their injury hand above the heart to help control bleeding, get them to lay down, and get them to slightly elevate their legs. It helps improve blood flood. Apply direct pressure to the wound with a clean cloth or a sterile gauze to control bleeding. And if whatever was blown off is still recognizable, which is just another way of saying available, rinse it with clean water gently, no scrubbing, and don't slap any antiseptics or disinfectants on it. Place whatever it is in a clean water type plastic bag and slap the bag in a container filled with ice or cold water. And I know you don't want to be looking at it, let alone playing with it, but don't let it sit in direct contact with the ice or it'll damage. But if you're bringing them to hospital yourself, hear me, listen to my words, bring the preserved amputated part with you. You went to all the trouble of polishing and tuck wearing the thing, and you would be surprised by the number of people who, in all the panic, forget. So what the hell happened? Well, the first thoughts were sabotage or a colossal hardware failure, but the real answer was so much more complicated, no lengthy investigation required. After a Centauri had run the diagnostics, they knew exactly what happened and released a fireworks one O one style statement that walked through the whole thing. When Centauri sent a signal, it started a code which started the computer, which started the firing sequence, and the computer contained a primary launch file, and of course it generated a backup. These two files are supposed to merge to create a new launch file, which is sent to each location, detailing the exact launch sequence in timing, but somehow a quote unintentional procedural step caused an anomaly that doubled the primary firing sequence. Their report said the display sequence started exactly when it was expected to and the systems executed the file the way it appeared. The command code was initiated and the new file did exactly what it thought it was supposed to do. The new primary file contained two sets of instructions, so it executed all sequences simultaneously. It executed the file and the backup. Once the firing code was received, all those rows upon rows of PBC cannons, hand ridge for payloads and all the allowed to at choreography went down to toilet. It wasn't civilized, but it was spectacular. Purdon said, when you have twenty thousand fireworks going off in thirty seconds, it's quite a show. It's just not the show we planned, and he vowed to make it up to San Diego. Sentauri was heartbroken that the show didn't go off as planned, and he offered to do next years show for free. He was just thankful that nobody was hurt. He said, we'll take the ridicule just as long as no one was injured, and true to their word, Garden State came back in twenty thirteen, but they lost the twenty fourteen bid to the incumbent rival, Pyro Spectaculars. So fully for them, Sentauri went on to say, like anything in life, things happen, and you could be the best race car driver in the world and slam into the wall on the third turn. Because all of a sudden attire blows out. No one ever gets to talk about the six thousand great things that you did, only the one bad one. The only way to make people understand was to say, give me the worst event of your life, and let's spend an hour going through it. And people being people. Of course, some of them demanded their gas or their parking money reimbursed, and the press went on to call it the Big bust or the Big Bay blunder. But for the other ninety something percent, the vast majority, they said they would have paid through the nose to see something that intense, and to be clear, I am with them. And the show was short and sweet and over, but all was not lost. Video of the disaster was posted on the San Diego subreddit before someone reposted it to YouTube, where it was viewed more than ten and a half million times in just the first forty eight hours. Those thirty seconds became one of the loudest, most epic, and shared fails in Internet history, and before long Perdin would say it was the best thing that ever happened to the show. The viral video got so much attention that sponsorships and projected attendance for the next year exploded again unintended, and Perdon went on to say that if he had known how much interest blowing up a bunch of barges would have brought, he would honestly thought about arranging this disaster way back on year two or three. It's not very often that we talk about anything without a body count on this show, but it's kind of nice when we do. And I never overly cared about fireworks shows, but this wasn't some simple fireworks show. This was a once in a lifetime spectacle that you experience with every sense you have. For those in attendants who felt somehow robbed, I point out that as attension spans continue to slide, I'm going to pretict that abbreviated shows like this one will become increasingly normalized and naysayers will be left behind. Remember when Marty we had Fly played Johnny be Good at the Chapman under the Sea Dance and the crowd just wasn't ready for that giant guitar solo at the end yeah, same thing here. So to answer the question where in history would I travel to witness some disaster this one. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo, or you can just buy me a coffee at buy meacoffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global Medic dot CoA On the next episode, choose an executor of your estate, update your will, and hug your loved ones a little extra tight. We're going camping. Finally, it is the Los Alface's Campsite Disaster of nineteen seventy eight. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.