MythBusters Bust

[Dalton]

The family whose home was used as a backstop for the MythBuster's experiment has hinted that they plan to take the MythBusters to the cleaners, as it were.

They do have insurance for this sort of (extremely rare) happenstance, so I doubt this will hurt the show much financially. They're a ratings darling for Discovery Channel. However, you can expect more stringent safety regulations, restrictions on what experiments they can perform and where, as well as what's likely to be a private epic smackdown from Adam and Jamie to the Build Team, and I suspect limiting their experiments to what they can do at M5 (i.e. "no more blowing shit up"). You can also expect the people affected to claim far, far beyond property damage, including emotional pain and suffering, lost time at work, etc.

[Alyeska]

The insurance company they use also has a direct input on the tests they are allowed to conduct. The insurance company has on more than one occasion denied coverage on a test and that was the end of that. They will become more actively involved again.

Side note, the insurance company Mythbusters uses is the same company that covered Jackass and also covers Sheriff Joe in Arizona. So they know their shit.

[Solauren]

You're house is near a bomb range, and you complain something goes wrong?

Ha, that's beyond rich.

That's like buying a house beside the airport, and complaining about the planes.

[Skgoa]

When planes fall on my house, I am going to complain.

[Academia Nut]

Since they are engineers, I get the feeling that Adam and Jamie are going to be ripping apart the entire scenario along with the obvious third party investigators. I get the feeling that this was likely a freak accident in which case Discovery and their insurance people will probably settle the inevitable lawsuits out of court since they really don't want to generate any more negative press than this incident has already caused.

However, if anyone was screwing around or this incident could have in any way been reasonably preventable then I get the feeling that heads are going to roll over this. For all they seem to be goof offs on the show Adam and Jamie are safety conscious and we could see new members of the build team next season. That said, the guys at the bomb range and everyone else supervising them is probably also in major hot water right now, we're just not seeing as much since they are not the stars of a popular TV show.

All of that said, there is a reason that they go to a bomb range for these sorts of tests: it's a bomb range, things are supposed to explode and go flying there. I wonder if maybe the range was cleared for limited artillery type detonations before the houses started to encroach but someone forgot to change the classification as residential areas moved in closer than they should have for what the range was originally cleared for. Then again, this is California, the land of "Why did you build on that hill, it gets incinerated every five years?!" so who knows what the interaction between the bomb range, the residential areas, and the law was before this point.

[Broomstick]

When planes fall on my house, I am going to complain.

Understandable. However, when you build a house just yards away from an existing runway don't expect much sympathy from me when it happens. The closer you locate your home to a hazard the more likely that hazard is to occur.

[aieeegrunt]

My work we're dealing with that kind of asshole right now, some dickwad built an old folk's home right next to our factory. More old cranky dickwads moved in, now they are bitching about the noise and truck traffic coming from the factory and expecting us to somehow soundproof our facility.

You knew the factory was there when you built the building.

You drove past the fucking factory to look at the building and then moved into it.

And now you're surprised that it's noisy?

I'm proud of our management that they told them, politely, to fuck themselves.

[Solauren]

Academia Nut has a very good point. Zoning bylaws might not have been updated. It's possible no one thought it was an issue, and that the bomb range maybe shouldn't have allowed the canon in the first place.

[SCRawl]

Since they are engineers, I get the feeling that Adam and Jamie are going to be ripping apart the entire scenario along with the obvious third party investigators.

Just to be clear, nothing I've found indicates that they are engineers. They're both skilled builders, have plenty of experience, and have honorary doctorates in engineering, but neither could properly be called an engineer. They do have an engineer among the on-screen staff, though; Grant apparently has a degree in engineering, though again I don't know if he has any professional designation as such.

This may seem like nit-picking, but I don't see it that way. Like any profession, there's more to it than just knowing enough stuff. Engineers, doctors and (yes, even) lawyers take oaths before embarking on their careers. Breaking those oaths by doing something stupid could end their careers, and so they tend to take them seriously.

[Adam Reynolds]

They said the three other stars of the show -- Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara -- had been "calibrating" a homemade cannon, firing a ball made of either steel or cast iron into water barrels and a brick wall to make sure it had the same power as a historical cannon.

I knew it! When I first heard this story I knew it was going to be on those build team idiots*!


*-Not that they are actually stupid (well maybe Kari) but the reason I don't normally watch Mythbusters despite it being a fun show is the necessity of having to sit through those jackholes while waiting for Adam and Jamie's bits to come back on. Also recalling when they shocked Adam with their prank Ark of the Covenant and he got pissed at him becaus eit really could have injured him.

According to Adam in a speech he was giving for FORA.tv(I think), it was actually the produces that forced the Build Team to do the prank with the electric fence and not the members themselves(despite how it was portrayed).

They do have an engineer among the on-screen staff, though; Grant apparently has a degree in engineering, though again I don't know if he has any professional designation as such.

He is an electrical engineer, who are less likely to be professionally certified than mechanical or civil engineers.

[Academia Nut]

I stand corrected. I knew that Jamie and Adam had engineering degrees, but looking over the publicly available information it appears that those are honourary degrees given after the show started because of their contributions to science, so yes, they are in fact not engineers, which is an important distinction to make.

That said, I still get the feeling that the people who are in real shit are not the Mythbusters but the bomb range and the regulators looking over them because if the build team were actually doing anything wrong it was their responsibility to stop the experiment immediately, or even not approve the use of the bomb range for the experiment in the first place. I have a feeling Alameda County is also really going to feel a pinch if they get forced by this incident to relocate their bomb range because of NIMBYism (although the point should be made the houses are in the backyard of bomb range, not they in yours). All in all an unpleasant situation that thankfully is massively mitigated by the fact that no one got hurt.

[Solauren]

Ideally, any bomb or artillery range would own an area around the actual range as a buffer, not just relay on local zoning.

Say, a 1 mile radius area that's bomb range, and a further 2 (for a total of 3) mile radius that's "Buffer".

Please note: I have no idea what the sizes SHOULD be, I'm just doing that as an example. Obviously, the sizes should be relative to the explosives in question. A 3 mile radius range should not have explosions going off in it that could toss debris 4 miles, for example.

[Academia Nut]

Well artillery ranges are bloody enormous because modern artillery can hit targets across the horizon, so bomb ranges need significantly smaller exclusion zones. Also, since artillery ranges are owned by militaries they can legally say "If you get hit, its your own damn fault!"

Now, the issue here is that while the Mythbusters were firing artillery they were firing (relatively) primitive artillery that they probably did not expect to have the range to actually escape the exclusion zone of the bomb range. While they obviously were trying to be careful with their backstops since they were aiming at a hill with a concrete barrier on it, their highest concern was likely the cannon exploding on them. Still, while the Mythbusters insurance and Discovery is probably going to be settling out of court just to make the problem go away, the government officials on hand are going to be the ones likely to be in the most trouble in all of this.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The daily what has a map of the trajectory of the cannon ball. Apparently it went THROUGH the concrete backstop before continuing on into a neighborhood.

[LaCroix]

The build team are officially idiots now.

Just compare this map to the trajectory map, look where they pointed the cannon at, and then look to the north-north-east.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Your link doesn't appear to go to anything, LC.

[LaCroix]

Your link doesn't appear to go to anything, LC.

Strange, for me, it works fine...

Try Google Map for this coordinates: 37.720356,-121.880965 -> that's the bomb range.

You can see that they aimed the cannon in exactly the wrong direction, north-east, there would have been miles of open terrain, but they aimed west, where the houses are less than 2000 feet away.

[SCRawl]

You can see that they aimed the cannon in exactly the wrong direction, north-east, there would have been miles of open terrain, but they aimed west, where the houses are less than 2000 feet away.

But open space wasn't the only consideration. They aimed at an obstacle that was supposed to stop the cannonball, and they missed. I suppose it might have been wiser to have aimed that cannon at a similar obstacle in the other direction, but I don't know how many such obstacles were available, and whether or not they were mobile. (The fact that it included a cinder block wall makes me think that the targets were intended to be stationary.)

[LaCroix]

You can see that they aimed the cannon in exactly the wrong direction, north-east, there would have been miles of open terrain, but they aimed west, where the houses are less than 2000 feet away.

But open space wasn't the only consideration. They aimed at an obstacle that was supposed to stop the cannonball, and they missed. I suppose it might have been wiser to have aimed that cannon at a similar obstacle in the other direction, but I don't know how many such obstacles were available, and whether or not they were mobile. (The fact that it included a cinder block wall makes me think that the targets were intended to be stationary.)

They probably erected it. They have built walls at Alameda Range on many occasions to test various explosive myths. As far as the visuals go, there is only one permanent structure at the Range, and this is the bunker. I seriously doubt they aimed for that.

[starslayer]

They didn't aim west at all. The article says that they hit a house near the intersection of Tassajara and Somerset, which is east of the bomb range. True, they didn't aim northeast, but I don't know if the terrain there allows you to aim that way and still set up the targets, etc.

[LaCroix]

My bad. I meant east. For some reason, I switched east and west in my post. Seems I should join them in the idiot corner...

[CaptainChewbacca]

They didn't miss the obstacle, they went THROUGH it, probably because they had a math error somewhere in their power calculations.

[Dalton]

They didn't miss the obstacle, they went THROUGH it, probably because they had a math error somewhere in their power calculations.

No, because the muzzle angle shifted slightly upward right before the cannon fired, so it didn't hit the barrels of water and other obstacles designed to slow it down.

[D.Turtle]

Yeah, looking at the map, they should have definitely aimed in a different direction - the arc from west to north-east would have been fine, as there is lots of open ground in that direction. It shows once again, that you can never be too careful - they simply depended too much on the backstop, and didn't consider what would happen if the cannon ball went further in the direction they were shooting.

[CaptainChewbacca]

They didn't miss the obstacle, they went THROUGH it, probably because they had a math error somewhere in their power calculations.

No, because the muzzle angle shifted slightly upward right before the cannon fired, so it didn't hit the barrels of water and other obstacles designed to slow it down.

I guess you're right, the concrete wall wasn't supposed to be the only thing stopping the cannon ball.

edit-
Do you think they'll show the misfire on the show?