The Whale Interpretive Centre at Telegraph Cove, B.C., home to the largest collection of marine mammal skeletons in British Columbia, was destroyed by a fire on Dec. 31, 2024.
The Whale Interpretive Centre at Telegraph Cove , B.C., once housed the largest collection of marine mammal specimens in the province and welcomed about 10,000 visitors each year, but was destroyed by a fire on Dec. 31, 2024. The museum, founded in 2002, had spent more than 40 years collecting marine mammal skeletons, with Jim Borrowman saying the fire caused him “total panic” when he realized the museum had been reduced to ash.
He said he valued the collection at more than $2 million, but putting a value on the effort to create the collection is difficult. Volunteers were involved in every step, he said. “It was a huge amount of work and we were all volunteers … and nobody’s ever been paid to do anything and they just showed up because they love whales and they wanted to help,” said Borrowman. In the case of Finny, a 20-metre fin whale that died in a 1999 ship strike, the body had to be towed by tugboat from Vancouver hundreds of kilometres away to a beach near Telegraph Cove. The huge body was dragged ashore and defleshed, painstakingly cleaned and the bones then sunk in clean waters, degreased of their oils, then dried, in a process that took four years. Finally came the two-year project of rearticulating, or reconnecting, the skeleton and hanging it to loom over the heads of museum guests, who came from around the world
FIRE WHALES MUSEUM BRITISH COLUMBIA TELEGRAPH COVE
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