A City Facing Destructive Land Movement Would Benefit from Satellite Monitoring

The City of Rancho Palos Verdes in California has been in the news locally and internationally due to the activation of ancient landslide movements that are destroying property, roads, and utility lines. In September, the California Governor proclaimed a State of Emergency in the city after certain neighborhoods were placed under evacuation warnings.

Engineer Casey Jones has closely followed the developments in Rancho Palos Verdes, with several videos published on his YouTube channel. In his latest update, he examined Value.Space’s analysis of recent land movement affecting the city. The video has generated more than 70,000 views just a few days after publication.

Comparing the data provided by Value.Space to the ground-based land movement monitoring and geological mapping conducted by the city, he confirms that satellite data matches the known movements in detail. However, as Casey Jones notes, satellite-based monitoring can go much further.

“This technology would have additional value in monitoring other areas that up to now haven’t moved, to detect early signs of movement, to alert perhaps of a bigger situation brewing, that they may not have been previously aware of.”

“I believe that the city should be utilising this technology to get an early warning for potential movement in new landslide areas. It supplements their existing GPS data, which is much more limited, and would give them a more comprehensive ability to evaluate what’s going on in the area.”

Indeed, Value.Space has conducted further work on the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide development, which shows that land movement is accelerating in areas not under ground-based surveillance by the city.

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