'MythBusters' cannonball rips through house, van

 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Zany experiments testing scientific theories in
real-world settings have earned the TV show "MythBusters" a devoted
following, but a stunt gone awry met with an unhappy audience when an
errant cannonball went shooting through a California family's bedroom.

Sheriff's deputies are still measuring how, exactly, the cannonball
flew from a bomb range in the rolling hills flanking a suburban San
Francisco Bay area neighborhood and rocketed into the front door of a
home and through its master bedroom before landing in a neighbor's
parked minivan.

Hosts for the Discovery Channel show fired the cannonball Tuesday as
they filmed an episode testing whether other types of projectiles shot
from a cannon would pick up the same speed and have the same impact as
the steel ball. Later, the production team plans to film flying stone
cannonballs at a rock quarry in Northern California.

Instead of hitting a string of water-filled garbage cans, however, the
cannonball passed over the barrels, crashed straight through a
protective cinderblock wall and careened off the hill behind it, said
Alameda County Sheriff's Department spokesman J.D. Nelson.

"It missed the target and took kind of an oddball bounce," Nelson
said. "It was almost like skipping a rock on a lake. Instead of
burying it into the hill it just went skyward."

No one was injured, and the home's residents didn't even wake up until
the broken drywall settled on top of them, Nelson said.

The show's co-hosts planned to go to the neighborhood to speak with
those affected Wednesday afternoon, and a meeting was called with the
entire production staff to understand what went wrong.

"We are really, really grateful and glad that no one was hurt," co-
host and executive producer Adam Savage said in an interview.
"Discovery is committed to making this right and making sure that
everything that has been damaged is as good or better as before this
started."

Producers have used the cannon they built at the county's bomb range,
which is tucked in a valley in the suburb of Dublin, more than 50
times without incident, said Nelson, the department's liaison to the
show.

Once it was launched, the cannonball traveled about 650 yards, bounced
in front of the home, then tore through the front door and exited
through a wall on the back of the house.

The projectile then bounced at least once more and crossed the road
before smashing the window and dashboard of a gold minivan, where it
came to rest.

Jasbir Gill, who owns the minivan, said he and his children had just
gotten home.

"It's scary," Gill told the Contra Costa Times (http://bit.ly/
umCZnD ). "I was in the van five minutes before this happened."

"Mythbusters," which is produced for Discovery Channel by the San
Francisco-based Beyond Productions, issued a statement through
publicist Katherine Nelson on Wednesday saying all proper safety
protocol had been observed.

"Beyond Productions is currently assessing the situation and working
with those whose property was affected," she said.

The show, according to its website, mixes "scientific method with
gleeful curiosity and plain old-fashioned ingenuity to create (its)
own signature style of explosive experimentation."

President Barack Obama appeared on a segment last year aimed at
testing whether the Greek mathematician Archimedes actually used only
mirrors and the reflected rays of the sunset to set fire to an
invading Roman fleet.

 
Just think what might have happened if they hadn't observed all
proper safety protocols. :-)

Saw this one on the local news last night. I'm dubious about
the show's future.

 

I wish those guys were at least engineering *students*, eager to apply
the math and science that they've recently learned.

But no, they have materials and tools and workspace and test sites and
they maniacally *flail* at solutions.

One of their most ridiculous theories was that a tiny vibration
induced in the structure of a bridge would cause the sort of
increasing resonances that caused the Tacoma Narrows bridge to
oscillate wildly and come crashing down.

They failed to understand the difference between *frequency* and
*magnitude* of oscillations...

 

I *love* it when Krusty gets didactic.


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