Accidents happen, a lesson the crew of “Mythbusters” learned the hard way on Tuesday after one of their experiments resulted in a cannonball blasting clear through a house in Dublin, California, while the family was asleep inside.
The accidental wreckage didn’t stop there: After the cannonball smashed through the front door, bounced up the stairs, and exited through the wall of a bedroom where three members of the family were asleep, it bounced across a six-lane street, off the roof of another house, and went through the window of a minivan parked in a nearby driveway. This was at 4:15 in the afternoon, as kids were coming home from school. Amazingly, mercifully, no one was injured in the accident.
The cannonball was fired at the Alameda County Sheriff’s bomb range, and was supposed to go through a few water-filled barrels and then a concrete wall. Instead, it missed the barrels entirely, smashed through the concrete wall, bounced off the hillside in the back, and then flew 700 yards before finally going through the front door of the house.
The cannon has been used more than 50 times by the Mythbusters, without it careening through a suburban neighborhood.
“Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy,” said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. “You wouldn’t think it was possible.” He added: “We had some tremendous bad luck and some tremendous good luck.”
Good luck, indeed. Jasbir Gill, the owner of the now-smashed minivan, said he was “in the van five minutes before this happened.” Gill said he simply wants his car fixed, and an apology from the show’s producers. Katherine Nelson, a publicist for Beyond Productions, which produces “Mythbusters” for Discovery Channel, said they are “currently assessing the situation and working with those whose property was affected.”
Watch a news report on the incident below:
Here, a map of the cannonball’s destructive path:
