
JKL Museum of Telephony lost in fire - schoen
http://jklmuseum.com/jkl-museum-lost-in-fire/
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Aloha
This is a huge loss for telecommunications history preservation.

While the Museum of Communications
([http://museumofcommunications.org/](http://museumofcommunications.org/)) in
Seattle has switching equipment (much of it one-of-a-kind - JKL specialized in
Station Hardware and other items, and had many priceless one-of-a-kind
prototypes and the like - it will be hard to duplicate or find again
everything that was located at JKL - JKL was also starting collect extensive
documentation for preservation as well.

I'm just heartbroken at the scale of the loss, I'd targeted JKL for my next
trip into California, but I guess I'm too late.

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jshprentz
Recent photos (not mine) show the extensive collection lost to a forest fire.

[http://cowboyfrank.net/galleries/Trips/2015-08/index.htm#jkl](http://cowboyfrank.net/galleries/Trips/2015-08/index.htm#jkl)

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HarryHirsch
Why would anyone house priceless artefacts like that in a forest in a fire-
prone area? Why would anyone build _anything_ in a fire-prone forest?

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Aloha
I'm gonna guess you're not from California.

I'd not call it a forrest fire prone area by any measure, any more than any
real estate with a stand of trees is.

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HarryHirsch
Looking at it on the map, the warning signs are all there: suburban-rural
interface, western slope, wooded area with no firebreaks, and a climate with
hot and dry summers. Couldn't pay me enough to settle there.

~~~
Aloha
That could be any number of places in the west though, including much of the
edges of the Seattle Metro too.

I grew up with fire really, the issue really is the forrest service policy on
fire from the early part of the 20th century into the early 90's - which is to
say never allowing any fire ever, so because the smaller fires which would
remove excess fuel on the forrest floor every decade or two, we now live in a
world where every small fire becomes a major conflagration.

Nearly every major forrest fire we have is a byproduct of those forrest
management policies.

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botswana99
Sorry to hear about the fire. We need more efforts to keep phone history
alive. So much of our computer science is rooted in telephony -- information
theory, Unix, C etc.

The telephone museum in Ellsworth Maine is still open. I took my retired
Telephone Man father there and he thought it was great.

Http://thetelephonemuseum.org

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userbinator
This appears to be the fire, and it is a rather _large_ one:

[http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?...](http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=1221)

I wonder how much they can salvage, if anything...

