Earthquakes do tend to occur in pretty areas. Up until now all of the projects that I had been on were out in the middle of nowhere. This was my first "urban" project. This project took place in northern California, in Santa Clara County.
The point of this experiment was to characterize all of the faults (and there are a bunch of them) running through this area. For the most part the area of study was along the Los Gatos Creek, from up in the Santa Cruz mountains south of the city of Los Gatos, through Los Gatos, Campbell, and into San Jose. The recording instruments for this portion of the experiment, and the eleven shot holes where the explosions would be set off, were spread out along a line about 17 kilometers (10 miles) long.
Earlier in the year this same route was examined using cabled systems (where all of the sensors are connected by a cable connected to one recording instrument), and an 8 gauge shotgun. Many hundreds of shots, just a few meters from each other, were made to cover the entire route.
The above three photographs were taken near the southernmost end of the route. They are all photographs of the Lexington Reservoir (which was very low on water) taken from the western side. While it looks reasonably quiet here there were really a lot of houses hidden in them thar hills.
2014-08-03