Me and a couple buddies once had a somewhat related firework incident.
I was at a friends house and his brother showed up with this pretty big firework he'd got a hold of somehow. It was maybe the size of an average cigar, on a wooden rod about 3 feet tall and maybe as thick as a pencil.
We knew full well it was an illegal firework, but we figured it was the kind you often see on July 4th in neighborhoods that looks like a mini version of "real" fireworks - like with a "fireball radius" around 30 feet or so.
Since it was the middle of winter and had been raining heavily for days we figured (correctly) that we could get away with launching it in the back yard. But we were in for a shock.
There were no visuals to this thing at all (other than an extremely brief flash). Instead what we got was this INCREDIBLY loud explosion sound - much like "grand finale" noise makers in a commercial show. I remember M-80's, the real ones, back in the 1970's and those had NOTHING on this. There must have been at least a hundred car alarms that went off, for blocks and blocks.
We immediately and quietly got our butts back inside the house, and we were actually worried about getting seriously busted over it. There were cops cruising the neighborhood for like a half hour after this.
The thing was so loud we were really concerned that some kind of pipe bomb would have been suspected rather than a firework.
