Mythbusters have a Misfire...

It appears the Mythbusters guys had a "misfire" of a CANNON :eek:
Please see the following:



After 8 years on the air, Discovery Channel’s hit series MythBusters has finally had their first public accident during filming. While testing out a particular myth involving a cannon, a misfire occurred, which sent a cannonball flying through a nearby home. Fortunately, no one was injured.
The accident happened at 4pm on Tuesday, December 6, near the familiar Alameda County bomb range. Originally, the cannonball was supposed to pass through several barrels of water and a cinder block wall, in order to slow the projectile down. Upon misfiring, the cannon lifted and hit something that caused it to shoot over the protective hillside that surrounds the bomb range.
According to local television station KTVU, the cannonball bounced in front of a residential house, went through the front door and up through the second floor before finally exiting through the back wall. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to stop the cannonball.
After flying over an adjacent street, the cannonball bounced off of the roof of another house, and landed inside a parked minivan.
The owner of the van had this to say:
“I kind of looked inside and seen a big old cannonball. And I had just got out of the van five minutes earlier. I’m glad my kids weren’t inside the van. So lucky.”
After the accident occurred, the MythBusters crew sent over a senior producer to the homes that were affected by the cannonball. As Alameda County Sheriff J.D. Nelson said, “We never even had any kind of incident, let alone anything this terrible.”

Fortunately, the family – whose home was attacked like a medieval castle – had no idea that anything had happened until the dust settled, as everyone in the home was sleeping.
While there hasn’t been any word from the MythBusters or Discovery Channel directly, Sheriff Nelson did have this to say about the situation.
“They’re very sorry that this happened. And they have safety measures that are in place. They did have a misfire. And they have insurance for these kinds of things.”
Despite having their first public accident (Adam Savage has stated previously that there was a serious accident that occurred in the shop that will never be spoken of), the fact that MythBusters went so many years before anything like this occurred is a testament to the care and safety that they put into the execution of their experiments.
Oh, and as for the insurance company… they knew it had to happen eventually. I just want to be in the room with the person having to make that call.

No word yet on when the new episodes of MythBusters will begin airing (or whether or not they’ll include this incident).

Source: KTVU
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This is from the self-proclaimed "professionals" , I am glad no one was injured, Just wonder what would have been the law enforcement response if , say, I had done this ?

These guys have always kinda scared me anytime they have dealt with firearms. Seems they didn't take into consideration what lay beyond their backstop.
 
OMG, thats a pretty big Oopsy:eek:

I thought they did their "tests" out in the boonies, not within a cannonball's-toss of minivans and soccer moms.
 
Upon misfiring, the cannon lifted and hit something that caused it to shoot over the protective hillside that surrounds the bomb range.
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Weird misfire, but I wasn't there and can't comment.

Just wonder what would have been the law enforcement response if , say, I had done this ?
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I can address this and can tell you how I handled it. Being a member of the Bomb Squad, we investigated such mishaps and trust me, they do happen to private citizens. Mostly those who make their own cannons or fireworks.

Really it takes common sense. It deals with recklessness of the incident. If some guy was just trying to make fireworks in his back yard, and screws up, then we didn't really do much. If property damage, the guy was responsible.

But if he had a bunch of kids helping, then its a different story.

How ever if he's experimenting with pipe bombs and such, its a different matter. That in itself is a criminal matter.

If he is building a cannon, and it blows up in his back yard, its reckless endangerment. However if he tries his home made cannon at the range, and something goes wrong, and the investigation showed he did have some safety measures, then we treated it as an accident.

This is "in general" Understand all incidents are different, and are handled different. But you get the general ideal how I handed it. Other locations may or may not be different.
 
Yeah those cannon balls do bounce a bit....I can't wait for the actual footage.

I think the guy whos house got a big ole hole in it just won the lottery though.
 
Sometimes a person or group can take every safety precaution available, and still have an "event." Its like Murphy's law...Mister Murphy came to visit them this time. It seems that in this case no one is injured. I can not say for sure what happened as neither I, and most others were not there.

I would like to see the actual "myth" they were trying to bust, and also to see them go through everything in an episode, including touching on the investigation, damage, and any damages that are paid out. Why? I feel it would be a good, realistic lesson to others that when things go bad, even for those in TV and movies, that there can be a huge price to pay, and it can be used as a learning experience.

With the mythbusters crew testing various things, not just cannon, but also more common firearms, perhaps it can be a wake up call that things dont always go as they do on TV. While myself and others here try our best to be safe, I for one, and am sure others agree that we can "all" as a group try to strive for improving our safety. Just glad no one was injured physically.
 
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Reckon a surface danger zone overlay for an old cannon might be pretty hard to come by...

I enjoy the show as well, however, I too have cringed at some of the things they have done, with and without firearms. They do things, at times, that are unnecessarily risky to their crew.

They need an improved risk assessment process IMO...
 
I thought they did their "tests" out in the boonies, not within a cannonball's-toss of minivans and soccer moms.
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So did I! This kinda surprises me. I always pictured the "bomb range" as having several miles of open space around it in every direction, and it may have, but they didn't take into account that someone would ever be firing a full-sized cannon at the range.

My brother used to live in Alameda County (Fremont), and I know there are some large areas of open land in the western parts of the county, but I guess not quite open enough for that particular experiment.

Found an aerial view of the range: http://wikimapia.org/8706724/Alameda-County-Bomb-Disposal-Range

I hope they didn't fire the cannon in the southern direction! To the north, it doesn't look like it could hit anything for quite a distance.
 
A bit puzzled as to why they call it a "misfire". I thought misfire was when it didn't go off, or hangfired. Maybe I am missing their meaning.
 
If they were using the same set-up as they did with the pirate episode, they were firing to the EAST...which makes some sense, as there is a decent sized hill that way that would seem to be at least somewhat effective as a backstop. I'm taking a guess that they missed the target completely and the cannonball skipped off their backstop and went over the hill. I can't find anything on the address of the houses that were hit, so I can't Google Earth it...

It'll be interesting to see if they show ANY of the footage in an episode, or whether this particular myth will be "Not Happened" away.
 
From what I have gathered, the Alameda County bomb range has been encroached upon by new housing development (much like so many of our military bases), and lost much of it's buffer zone.

What may have been safe in the past, may not be today.

mete said:
Safety includes what can happen in bad situations ! No excuse for this .The experimant should have been done far away from any houses, cars etc !! Like out in the desert.
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Does that mean that no one in New York should ever be able to experiment with cannons?
You don't have any desert, nor the wide open spaces we enjoy in certain areas out west.

On a totally separate note: Do you understand what the San Francisco area is like? It isn't a tiny little village in the middle of the desert. The San Francisco area is actually fairly fertile, and is extremely populated. Driving to "the desert" to test this cannon, would be about the same as having them take a road trip to Reno, Nevada (or some one living in Syracuse NY driving to Philadelphia PA!).

Don't forget that the bomb range allowed them to use the cannon there. If you're going to place ill-informed blame, be sure to specify who you're sticking it to.
 
Yea I wouldn't say the blame lays entirely with the Mythbusters. If you asked me where the safest place to shoot a cannon is, and one of the options was "bomb range" I would probably pick that too. Besides they have the sheriff's department and explosives experts on hand for this. If there was something unsafe about the experiment those people should have spoke up. That's why they're there.

And since others posted that housing developments have encroached on the range over the years. Then it seems it's the range's responsibility to reassess their buffer zone and see if they're still operating a safe range.

Sometimes accidents happen and all the precautions in the world won't prevent them 100% of the time. I expect the homeowners will be getting a nice wad of cash after all this.
 
This is from the self-proclaimed "professionals" , I am glad no one was injured, Just wonder what would have been the law enforcement response if , say, I had done this ?
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I can't speak towards their professionalism (although my kids love the show) however; bad things happen with artillery no matter how professional the people running it are. I have seen a number of unsafe things over the years happen from even the best of military units. The vast majority are resolved without serious incident, but not always.

The truth is that when you work with explosives and anything in a system that has a failure rate then eventually you will have a failure that could potentially be catastrophic. It will be interesting to see if there is another incident in a short time frame from now. Often in military units when there is one then another occurs soon after. I don't know the show production cycle and what risk reduction measures they have taken however.
 
From what I have gathered, the Alameda County bomb range has been encroached upon by new housing development (much like so many of our military bases), and lost much of it's buffer zone.
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LOL, it really isn't a buffer zone if you don't control it and have it as a known safe (buffer) area. If you don't control it, then it is just a zone where trajedy is less likely. Using property not your own as a buffer zone is inappropriate.

This is from the self-proclaimed "professionals"
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Well, the Mythbusters guys are professionals and not just self-proclaimed. Not only are they professionals, but they are supervised by additional expert-specific professionals. You know there was a range officer present and supervising for Mythbusters to be using that range. Somebody with the city or county approved the use of the cannon at that range, undoubtedly another professional. Just because people are professionals does not mean that things will always go as planned and that is why proper safety considerations need to be made for a worst case scenario. Somewhere along the way, everyone missed the safety rule about knowing your target, backstop, and BEYOND and had not considered the worst case notion of a round leaving the range and where it would go.

There were a LOT of professionals involved in this mishap.
 
I assume they were using solid shot.

When I commanded an Army EOD Detachment in the Early 70's One of our primary off post missions was the recovery of and disposal of Civil War munitions.

We handled them with extreme caution and had a number of them deflagrate during the disposal prodecure. After the first one we set up witness panels with standard targets., During subsquent procedures we were able to document the effectiveness of these centry old projectiles.

Safety note: Handle with extreme caution.
 
Cannonballs as well as bullets go where they are aimed.

If the cannon they were using was properly secured this probably would not have happened.

Misfire or not,what the cannonball was shot out of was not aimed properly when it released the cannonball from the cannon.

I would guess that the crew misjudged the recoil on the cannon thinking simply the cannons own weight-which they are heavy as all get out-and that's pretty heavy-would keep the cannon aimed at the objects in the cannonballs way to slow it down.

Most cannons have a set screw for elevation but the cannon itself should also have been tied down to the ground in some manner to keep it from hopping up when it fired.

You would not believe the motions that can happen with ordinace firing equipment.

One of the most passively dangerous things you can fire if an old salt does'nt give you about a fifteen minutes heads up on how to not die using the thing.

This 'accident' is a very serious thing and not something the producers of Mythbusters are going to be able to apologize their way out of.

Look for some massive fines as well as lawsuits over this situation.

I have watched the show since it started and thought like most people here thought that they were in the boondocks when they shot off ordinace in their many experiments.

And contrary to what some people are posting,I have always been impressed that they have at least addressed the lethality and danger of most of the experiments they have engaged in and had safety procedures in place before they started them.

This was a surpised to me when it happened and I do not expected it to ever happen at Mythbusters again.

And Thank God no ones family member was right in the path of that cannonball.

That just shows you the true destructive power of what the soldiers who fought in all the old wars faced on the battlefield as well as the bystanders whose homes were on those same battlefields too.
 
These morons put people's lives in danger in order to make a buck. Someday, they, or one of these other reality shows, will kill someone.
 
Look for some massive fines as well as lawsuits over this situation.
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Well, that is why they have insurance. I think Mythbusters will come out okay financially. I am guessing that their insurance may also cover the range and experts. I can't imagine the county lawyers allowing the range to be used by outsiders without the outsiders providing liability coverage. Fines may be another matter, but they probably won't be limited to Mythbusters.
 
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