Its illegal to use fireworks that leave the ground, like bottle rockets and mortars, but everyone just drives up the road a bit to the indian reservation and stocks up on some really huge stuff. Some of the stuff sold there is pretty much the same stuff the pros use, on a slightly smaller scale. I think the largest shells they sell are 5-inch diameter, for example.
In a neighborhood near my house (ahem), they had about 20 mortar shells about 2 inch diameter. Thing is, they just set them out in the open on the sidewalk while launching them from a cardboard tube maybe 30 ft away. Any malfunction would have probably resulted in the whole lot going up since they were all out in the open with no protection from stray sparks or malfunctions or low altitude early bursts, or even one of the "legal" fountains tipping over and shooting over there by accident.
One fountain did tip over, fortunately it merely shot towards a group of 6 small children and an adult intercepted it and kicked it back into the street, and it burned out before it wandered towards the unused stuff.
My kids are small so I stuck with those little snap pop things, some colored sparklers that kind of sucked, some spinners, some really annoying screaming fountains, and some smallish regular fountains. They though they were great and it was all fun until some older neighbor kids started playing with charcoal lighter fluid. They'd soak a tennis ball in the stuff, light it off, and kick it around, right next to everyone watching and next to the pile of unused fireworks. That sort of ended the fun part of my night since from that point on I had to keep my kids within arms reach and stay in a spot with a short clear path to a protected area in case stupidly dangerous played out badly. They used up 2 quart-sized bottles of lighter fluid. I thought for sure one kid was going to get burned. He soaked the front tire of his bicycle in lighter fluid then drove thru a puddle of flaming lighter fluid. It was spattering up at him like you'd expect, and he got a little panicky and drove faster, which splattered it even higher... It burned out just before his pants caught fire, so of course he went back and did it again.
Funny thing about the kids with the lighter fluid... Their dad is a firefighter and there are 12 kids in the family. I guess that stuff is ok when you've got a handful of spare kids around? Dad was on duty of course so only their Mom was around. And she didn't say anything so I just kept my kids ready to run for cover and my bucket of water close.
