be repaired. Six friends were in the basement of a nine-story building relocating barrels when it came down around them on December 7. Their injuries were minor, but one person did suffer a broken arm. They supposedly sustained themselves on the food supplies—fruit salad, pickles, and smoked ham—that were available in the basement for 35 days before their rescue in January, but this turned out to be a hoax. Aftershocks The area where Armenia lies is of interest to seismologists and geologists because of the relatively early stage of continental collision occurring there and because the earthquake's strong aftershock sequence and significant surface faulting presented scientists with an environment to study reverse faulting. Twelve days after the mainshock a French-Soviet team installed a temporary seismic network in the epicentral area to record aftershock activity (a separate expedition from the United States also visited the site). The initial portion of work included nearly a full week setting up the seismometers and optimizing their operation and, with that complete, two full weeks of continuous operation was then completed with twenty six seismometers covering an area over 1,500 km2. The final stage concluded with seven weeks (through the end of February 1989) of continued monitoring with a reduced capacity of twenty units. The instrumentation included ten smoked paper analog seismometers that were configured to allow for 48 hours of continuous single-component data recording. Six digital recorders built by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg were also used to record signals from three-component seismometers. Eight of the selected sites were equipped with a vertical component velocity transducer along with an FM telemetry link to transfer data back to a central station where a three-component unit was stationed. There the seismic signals were digitized, along with an internal time signal and an external DCF77 time signal, and stored on magnetic tape. The tapes were then played back and the P-wave and S-wave arrival times were used to automatically determine aftershock locations. Approximately two hundred aftershocks were recorded each day for the first several days of the expedition and at the end of the recording period in February the equipment was still picking up around 100 shocks per day. The team then set out to determine an accurate velocity model using data from the more accurate telemetry network. The soviet geophysicists detonated 100 kilograms of TNT in a hole drilled near the mainshock epicenter