The Discovery Channel show “MythBusters” often makes a lot of noise with its science experiments designed to prove whether widely circulated assumptions are really true or false. Once in a while, things get out of hand, as they did Tuesday in California east of San Francisco.
ABC-owned KGO-TV reports that a cannonball fired from the Camp Parks bomb range missed its intended target and flew into the city of Dublin, CA, where it hit the wall of a house, bounced across four lanes of a street, bounced off the roof of another house and smashed through the window of a parked minivan, finally coming to rest inside the vehicle.
The idea was reportedly to determine whether other materials shot out of a cannon could be as effective as a cannonball. Of course, first you have to measure the effectiveness of an actual cannonball. The one that went awry was reported to be the third fired. The first two landed where they were supposed to – in trash cans full of water. But the third decided to visit the nearby town.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is investigating. The good news is that the cannonball did only property damage, but didn’t hit any people as it ripped through the Dublin neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon.
