That One Time a Utah Department of Transportation Avalanche Cannon Misfired and Blew Up a Family’s House 3 Miles Away

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In March 2005, Lori and Scott Connors’ 3-year-old son was lying on their living room floor watching television when a howitzer shell exploded in their backyard. Deadly flying shrapnel penetrated their home and flew right over his little head. He was covered in broken glass and extremely frightened — had he been standing up it would have been a completely different story.

There were several large holes in the walls, shredded pieces of couch and chair fabric in the living room, and pieces of shrapnel embedded in the upstairs bathroom wall. Broken glass lay everywhere and a sheet of plywood replaced the window. Scott and Lori Connors’ shed in their backyard was in pieces, sprawled around a boulder-size crater in their lawn. The Connors family home looked like it had been bombed — because it was.

What has just been described is the state of the Connors’ Pleasant Grove, Utah home after a Utah Department of Transportation 105 mm Howitzer projectile, used for avalanche mitigation work, missed its mark and landed in their backyard in March of 2005. The story was originally reported by Deseret News, detailing that a car across the street from the Connors’ home was also damaged from the blast along two other houses in the vicinity of 1600 East and 500 South on the Pleasant Grove bench.

“It was a miracle no one was killed or injured,” Scott Connors told a reporter with Deseret News.

The blast was over three miles off course. The Utah Department of Transportation took responsibility for the errant shot, saying that the event was “a rarity,” even though they previously set off 560 rounds of explosive material every year in an attempt to control avalanche danger in the Provo, American Fork, Big and Little Cottonwood canyons, as reported by Deseret News. Nowadays, GASEX exploders and other forms of remotely operated avalanche control devices are increasingly replacing traditional howitzer cannons throughout Utah (Snowbird isn’t planning to retire its guns until 2030).

Investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation were initially called to the scene until they determined that no terrorist or malicious intent was involved. UDOT spokesman Geoff DuPaix said the shells came pre-packaged in bundles, but that human error was the cause, blaming the off-target firing on too much gunpowder and a failure to follow proper procedure. UDOT Deputy Director Carlos Braceras commented on the incident at the time:

“I’m confident that had our procedure been followed properly, this incident would not have occurred,” Braceras said.

UDOT avalanche control workers follow a step-by-step procedure prior to firing each shot. One of the steps calls for the assistant gunner to observe the loader “prepare the round by removing the correct number of (propellant) bags” from the shell. In this case, the loader did not remove the correct number of propellant bags from the shell. Additionally, the assistant gunner was not observing the loader, according to avalanche-center.org.

The Connors counted their blessings that no one was injured or killed and UDOT, who claimed responsibility for the incident, established additional safeguards that have prevented such a devastating miscalculation from ever occurring again. Thankfully, this lesson in avalanche mitigation history was one that resulted in property damages — not the loss of human life.

• Related: Those Window-Rattling Booms on Powder Days? The Howitzers Behind Them Are Nearly Gone

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This story was updated on August 31, 8:35 a.m., 2026 with new information.