When deadly flames incinerated hundreds of homes in Santa Rosa's Fountaingrove neighborhood earlier this month, they also destroyed irreplaceable papers and correspondence held nearby and once belonging to the founders of Silicon Valley's first technology company, Hewlett-Packard.
The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash.
More than 100 boxes of the two men's writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world's largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies — itself an HP spinoff.
Source: The Press Democrat
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:50PM
Homes in the Los Angeles valleys do make attempts at fire-proofing, with large onsite water tanks, generator backed water pumps to spray the water with, and flame resistant materials on the roof and walls. However, it is just an attempt, if the fire burns long and hot enough, the water eventually runs out, windows break in the heat, and things inside eventually ignite.
If you really want a "fireproof" home, you need to prescribe a boundary of 30' or more around the outside of the home with no flammable materials on the ground, be located in an area without a lot of trees and other fuel, etc. It's a big price to pay for something that might happen once in 5 lifetimes.
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