The Dog House
The Dog House
The Dog House was a little fiberglass room that looked like an ice-fishing hut.
It was placed about in the center of the "line" and moved periodically throughout the day.
It was about four feet in diameter and housed an array of hi-tech digital recording equipment used in the surveys (worth about $250,000 in 1979 dollars!)
From the Dog House, I'd communicate with a couple helicopters (one for the survey crew and one for the all the folks on the line - about a twenty person crew.)
We'd lay out about a mile of cable and stick microphones ("*Jugs") in the ground every four hundred and forty feet.
Throughout the day, we'd blow up dynamite in the middle of the cable (where the Dog House was), record the vibrations and then move the cable forward.
Moving the Dog House
On a Truck Crew, you would put the Dog House in the back of a pickup truck and move it up the line. But I worked on a Portable Crew, so we used a helicopter for that operation.
The Dog House on the line, somewhere in Utah. It would stay in one spot for as many shots as you could get from the rotary switch before having to move it to another location up the line.
Then I'd clip it onto the bottom of a big-ole cable hanging from the bottom of a helicopter and send it on its merry way.
The back crew would roll up one four hundred foot cable and all the Jugs after every shot. They tied them up and left them on the ground for the helicopter to retrieve and shuttle up to the front crew who was responsible for laying down the cable and Jugs.
Most of the time it was fairly routine, but occasionally the blast would set off a fire and we'd burn three hundred acres of pristine forest in Utah before losing our permit and getting kicked out of the state.
* the folks that stuck the little microphones (Jugs) into the ground were called Juggies and they used to have a Juggy Convention every year to get together and drink.