In October 2014, before a crowd of thirty thousand people, including the mayor and the governor, Lasko held up a walkie-talkie and gave the order to light the fire. Nothing happened. He waited. Still nothing. The ignition system had failed. There was no backup and no contingency plan. All the effort had gone into mitigating the risk of the fire spreading, not the risk of the fire not igniting in the first place. A politician later called the festival “the fiasco on the river,” and the name stuck. The event became a punch line. The theater company ultimately folded, and Lasko lost his job.[29]
