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'Mythbusters' Cannonball Experiment Goes Very Very Wrong

A ‘Mythbusters’ cannon experiment took a wrong turn on Tuesday, after the shows crew accidentally fired a cannonball past its target into a residential neighborhood turning the six inch projectile into a suburban pinball.

The 6 inch projectile flew past its mark on the sheriff’s bomb disposal range., took an unforeseen bounce off a safety berm and barreled into the quiet Tassajara Creek neighborhood of Dublin about 4 p.m. Tuesday. There, it wreaked havoc bouncing off a sidewalk, blasting through a front door, barreling up some stairs and careening through a bedroom where a man, woman and child were reportedly sleeping.

The cannonball then punched through the home’s exterior stucco wall, sailed across a six-lane thoroughfare, ricocheted off the roof of another home and finally crashed through the window of a parked, empty Toyota Sienna minivan, where it finally came to rest.

“I had just got out of the van five minutes earlier,” owner Jasbir Gill, 42, told local media, according to KTVU. “I’m glad my kids weren’t inside the van. So lucky.”

“It was crazy. That’s for sure,” said Sgt. J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. “If someone asked me two days ago, ‘Could this homemade cannon shoot that far, off a hill into this neighborhood?’ I would have said no way. But now it’s confirmed.”

All in all, things didn’t turn out as bad as they could have considering how dangerous this wacky stunt was. Miraculously, no one was injured in the bizarre accident and the hit Discovery Channel show is fortunately covered in the event this kind of thing happens. On the other hand, the bomb disposal range has been shut down pending a safety review.

 

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