The Battle of Tassajara Creek: When Perfectly Good Suburban Artillery Goes Awry

A cannonball misfired during the filming of an episode of  "Mythbusters" struck a Dublin Ranch home Tuesday afternoon then careened across a busy road and ended up inside a van parked in a driveway.

Amazingly, no one was hurt in the 4:15 p.m. incident during which a 5.5-inch projectile struck a two-story home on Cassata off of Old Westbury Way near Tassajara Road in east Dublin.

Apparently, the cannonball went through the house while the occupants were asleep, then exited the structure and bounced across Tassajara and into a parked car, breaking its glass and landing inside the vehicle.

The Alameda County Sheriff's Department is investigating the incident and has shut down the bomb range in the meantime.

The department's bomb squad often works with the popular Discovery Channel show because its creators are based in the Bay Area and often film in the East Bay.

The show was using a cannon it had built about two years ago and had used multiple times, said Sheriff's spokesman J.D. Nelson, who regularly assists the production. The cannonball was supposed to go through barrels of water and through a cinder block wall, but instead, due to a "misfire," it went over the barrels, struck a hill and bounced off the range.

"It took a very unfortunate bounce that sent the ball skyward and out of the range," Nelson told media at the scene Tuesday evening.

He said it was a case of "tremendous bad luck" that ended up being "tremendous good luck" because there were no injuries.

Nelson said the three occupants of the home, including one child, slept through the cannonball strike but were awoken by dust from the aftermath settling onto their faces.

Dublin resident Jasbir Gill, who lives at the corner of Springvale and Bellavue, said the cannonball landed inside his mini-van. He said he was inside the house  at the time but had been in the van with his kids just five to 10 minutes earlier.

"I thought it was only a window, but I looked inside and the whole dash was smashed," said Gill. "It's scary."

The Sheriff's Department's shooting range and bomb squad training facility is used often by "Mythbusters," said Livermore Patch columnist Susan Young, an entertainment writer familiar with the show, which is known for concocting strange experiments to test wacky theories.

  Nelson said the television show has used the county's bomb range more than 50 times for experiments and filming.

  "We never even had any kind of an incident let alone anything this terrible," Nelson said.