So how exactly is the recompense going to be handled here? Will Mythbusters/Discovery pay for the repairs directly, or do the homeowners have to file a claim with their own insurance company which will then be reimbursed by Mythbusters? If the latter, you know the homeowners' premiums are going to go up, since that's what happens when you file a claim. That's not very fair, is it? Shouldn't Mythbusters pay for it all directly out of their own pocket, since it was all their fault? And while I can't speak for these homeowners, it would not be much consolation to me if the guys on the show just said "Sorry" for nearly destroying my home.
Oh, I see...I missed that reference. Thanks for explaining. Anyway...here's something I don't get about what happened here. Maybe someone knows the regulations for these situations. At least to me, it seems like if you're going to an artillery range to fire something, that you should be required to use a range with more room than the maximum range at which your weapon could still cause injury (which would mean firing it at maximum force at 0 degrees inclination). Either this common-sense regulation doesn't exist (which it ought to), or the Mythbusters didn't know the range and power of their own damn weapon. Either of those options seem like really dumb things to have happened.
Why are people being so hard on the Mythbusters and the Discovery team? The Mythbusters on-air talent were supervised by experts. If the experts didn't expect this situation, why should the hosts of the TV show? Precautions were taken, regulations were followed. It was just a highly improbable occurrence. No one got hurt. Damages will be repaired and paid for...why all the second-guessing? It's happened to the team before, it just didn't get publicized as widely.
Barely. People *could* have been hurt or even killed. It was pure luck that no one was. But like I said, exactly how will this happen? If Mythbusters/Discovery flat-out pays for the whole thing out of their own pocket, then that's OK, I guess (assuming the repair process doesn't take too long and result in too much inconvenience to the homeowners). No need to get the homeowners' own insurance company involved - if they do, then their premiums will go up, and that's not fair. Accident though this may have been, it was still Mythbusters' fault.
I'm of the firm opinion that if you're dumb enough to live next to a bomb range, and then something explodes therein and screws you over, you have no one but yourself to blame for living next to a bomb range. Discovery/Mythbusters shouldn't have to suffer because people make stupid life choices. As others have said; they took precautions, they consulted experts, and they used a bomb range. Demanding that they do anything beyond paying for repairs and offering an apology is absolutely absurd.
Here's a news report on it. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj-CErr0VOY&feature=player_embedded[/yt]
If I was one of the people affected by this I would demand that Grant build me a robot in compensation. Something similar to Geoff Peterson, but more butch. Seriously, the cannonball flew over half a kilometre after crashing through a wall and bouncing off a hill? That's terrifying and impressive.
Don't be silly. You know what I'm talking about. I don't doubt that their insurance will pay for it, but exactly HOW will they pay for it? Will they pay for the damages directly, or will the homeowners have to file a claim with their own insurance company which will then in turn be reimbursed by Discovery? Because if it's the latter, like I said, their premiums will go up.
You know, the thing that surprised me the most about this article is that Jamie is 56. I knew he was a bit older than Adam but I didn't think it would be by that much.
Have you ever been in a car accident? If I'm in a car accident I exchange insurance information with the other party, we report it and the insurance companies pretty much take it from there mostly basing their decisions on witness and police reports. In the case the home owner's insurance company will state that it was pretty clearly Discovery's fault, especially with the police report, and Discovery's insurance company will have no choice to pay out. The homeowners' insurance companies have to pay nothing and do nothing but act as a mediator between their clients and Discovery's insurance. That's what insurance companies are for! Anyway, that the cannonball traveled so far and through so much is pretty astounding.
cues up the song Afternoon Delight.... talk about a bang if it was me, all id ask for is the money to cover the damages, a little extra for my troubles and to be on the show and named an honorary mythbuster... but then again im a fan
Well, there's no real arguing with that statement. It's just far more likely that, if anyone is ever maimed or killed in a Mythbusters experiment, it'll be one of the hosts, not someone napping in a house outside the bomb range. Don't worry! The insurance companies will take care of it. Maybe the homeowners already had to pay a little extra for being near a bomb range. I wouldn't be surprised if the insurance company was already well-aware of the risk associated with the location and adjusted the premiums accordingly.
The ironic thing is, this is EXACTLY the kind of wacky, completely improbable news story we've seen them try to replicate in the past! If it hadn't happened to them, I can easily see them trying to break down all the different elements, to see if a cannonball could really fly that far, or travel through so many different objects...
In the article the home owner says they should have been notified that a dangerous experiment was taking place. My God man, it's a bomb range and dangerous experiments take place there all the time. He's sound close to some-one who buys are home near an airport and then complains about the noise.
Hell. they may still do that. But, man, that's pretty amazing everything that ball did. I bet the whole time it was screaming "I'm the Juggernaut BITCH!"
That's true. However, people have a tendency to assume the most visible faces are also the most responsible ones. And the show kind of promotes that impression by having the hosts perform most of the on-camera stuff themselves, not to mention by recording those fictionalized intro segments where the hosts seem to be spontaneously proposing the myth to each other and concocting a procedure on the spot, even though they're really just summing up a development process that was done weeks or months earlier by their writers, producers, researchers, etc. as well as the Mythbusters themselves. It certainly does sound like a force majeure ("act of God") kind of situation, something that nobody could've predicted and nobody's really to blame for. After all, this was the third test fire of the cannon, and the first two presumably worked okay. I hope it does turn out that way and that there are no penalties for Kari, Grant, Tory, or Sgt. Nelson. That's a good point. I've often thought these guys are tempting fate by conducting so many potentially dangerous experiments themselves, and that it's only a matter of time before one of them suffers worse than a singed-off eyebrow or a banged knee. But I think one can argue with the statement that it was pure luck that nobody was hurt. It wasn't a crowded mall, but a quiet residential neighborhood -- at 4 PM on a Tuesday, when a lot of people would've still been away at work or afterschool activities or whatever. Statistically speaking, the percentage of the region's volume that was occupied by human bodies was quite low, so the probability that a randomly fired cannonball would strike any human being (or pet) was commensurately low. Keep in mind that there are only two documented instances in history of people being struck by meteorites, even though meteorites fall to Earth all the time. And both of them survived. (An Alabama woman was struck in the hip in 1954, a German boy struck in the hand in 2009.) So really, given that the cannonball wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, the odds were very much in favor of no one being hurt. It would've been a statistical fluke if anyone had been. Just as it was a huge statistical fluke that the cannonball bounced the way it did in the first place. Of course it could've potentially hurt someone, and of course it's always important to keep safety in mind and avoid mishaps like this wherever possible because of that nonzero risk. But it's not a miracle that nobody was hurt, because that was simply the most probable outcome of the event. It's like getting a pair of threes in a poker hand and saying it's pure luck you didn't get a straight flush. That's kind of getting the probabilities backward. Yeah, they'll be trying to replicate this 25 years from now on Mythbusters: The Next Generation.