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Mapped polygons of landslides triggered by the 2016-2017 storm season, eastern San Francisco Bay region, California

May 30, 2023

The winter rainy season of 2016-2017 brought abundant rainfall to the state of California, including the San Francisco Bay region. Thousands of shallow landslides were triggered as a result of saturated soils and intense rainfall from strong winter storms in January and February 2017. The highest concentration of landslides from these storms occurred in the eastern part of the bay region, where landslides in the hills east of the Cities of Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, and Fremont, and elsewhere in the region, damaged homes, displaced a major electrical transmission-line tower, and blocked several heavily traveled state highway routes. The data presented here support our published map titled, "Landslides Triggered by the 2016-2017 Storm Season, Eastern San Francisco Bay Region, California" where we mapped a total of 8,928 landslides throughout the study area. The mapping encompasses a total area of approximately 1,050 square kilometers (km²) bounded by the Carquinez Strait and San Francisco Bay to the north and west, respectively, to the Interstate Highway 680 corridor to the south and east. Using high-resolution imagery, we mapped individual landslides as polygons. The greatest calculated landslide concentration (measured as the total number of landslides per unit area) exceeded 80 landslides per 0.25 km2 in the hills east of the City of Berkeley.

Publication Year 2023
Title Mapped polygons of landslides triggered by the 2016-2017 storm season, eastern San Francisco Bay region, California
DOI 10.5066/P98MVEGI
Authors Skye Corbett, Brian Collins
Product Type Data Release
Record Source USGS Digital Object Identifier Catalog
USGS Organization Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center