In the summer of 1973, the six-story National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis employed about 2,200 people. They were charged with maintaining and protecting 38 million sensitive military personnel records.
At sixteen minutes and fifteen seconds after midnight on July 12, an alarm sounded at a nearby firehouse. The first fire trucks arrived on the scene within minutes, but the blaze on the top floor of the six-story building was already raging out of control. Forty-two fire districts eventually responded and fought the fire for nearly four days before finally stowing their hoses and returning to their home districts.
They were able to contain the fire to the sixth floor and no lives were lost, but what remained of the 200,000-square foot area was a sodden, smoldering swamp of burnt and waterlogged records. An estimated 16 to 18 million personnel files-the military life histories of America’s warriors–were lost. Typical records contained enlistment documents, training forms, discharge papers, performance reports and pay information.
As Walter Stender and Evans Walker pointed out in their 1974 article in The American Archivist, this wasn’t the first time that fire ravaged important historical records. A fire at the War Department in 1800 destroyed irreplaceable historical records of America’s first decade. In 1836, a blaze at the U.S. Patent Office destroyed models and blueprints of inventions that formed the technological backbone of the nation. Invaluable art and other relics were lost in an 1851 fire in the U.S. Capitol. In 1890, the entire Decennial Census was lost in a fire at the Census Bureau.
But, arguably, none of them was as devastating to so many people as the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center.
A Conspiracy?
Conspiracy theories about how the fire started abound. Some believe it was a terrorist attack by an anti-government organization. (Coincidentally, the fire took place the same week that the military draft ended.) Others believe that the federal government itself started the fire to destroy unwanted and sensitive files, or to erase certain World War II records. Some went as far as to say the government set the fire intentionally to reduce budget costs by destroying an entire floor of a federal building.
No one takes such accusations seriously, but the exact cause of the fire is still unknown more than three decades later. FBI investigators looked for evidence of arson, but they could never determine its point of origin or pinpoint the exact time it started. They did find cigarette butts in trashcans on the sixth floor, but the agents were never convinced that cigarette embers started the conflagration. A 1975 investigation indicated that the top floor of the center had little ventilation and that air pressure in the cramped overcrowded space may caused the dry records to erupt in flames.
Blame the Bureaucratics?
Although no one claims to understand how the fire started, everyone agrees that it could have been prevented.
In 1951, the Department of Defense asked a St. Louis firm to design a building that would become the National Personnel Record Center on a 70-acre site in Overland, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. Teams from the firm visited several records centers around the country to study their operations. One visit was to a facility operated by the U.S. Navy at Garden City, N.Y., and another to a records center in Alexandria, Va., operated by the Department of Defense.
The two facilities offered opposing fire safety plans. The Navy center was fully equipped with sprinklers for fire safety, and officials there urged the St. Louis architects to include them in the new St. Louis facility. Senior officials at the Government Services Agency refused. More afraid of water than fire, they strongly opposed installing a sprinkler system.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the huge facility in 1956 at a cost of $12.5 million, more than $86 million in 2005 dollars. The GSA won the fire safety argument. The facility not only lacked a sprinkler system, most of its more than one million square feet was designed like an open warehouse with huge areas uninterrupted by firewalls or compartments. By 1973, wiser heads had prevailed and plans were in the works to install a sprinkler system. By then, it was too late.
Ironically, more records may have been destroyed by water damage than by the fire itself. Firefighters had pumped millions of gallons of water into the building and every one of the center’s six floors had several inches of standing water on the floor, soaking carton after carton of paper records into a mushy mess. Thus, the DOD’s fear of water damage was realized in a manner that no one could have predicted.
The same year the NPRC was completed, the National Archives and Records Service decided that future facilities under its control would be equipped with sprinklers, smoke detection systems and adequate firewalls. It was a decision made 17 years before the 1973 fire, but still too late to protect the sensitive records stored at the NPRC.
Can it Happen Again?
Today, the National Personnel Record Center is still one of the National Archives and Record Administration’s largest operations. It remains the central repository of U.S. military and civil service personnel records.
Is a repeat of fiery 1973 disaster possible? Ronald L. Hindman, director of the NPRC, makes no guarantees, but he said that current safeguards make a recurrence highly unlikely. An efficient sprinkler system is installed, food and drinks are prohibited in the storage area, smoking within the facility by employees is cause for immediate dismissal, and firewalls are now placed strategically throughout the building,” Mr. Hindman pointed out.
Scott Levins, the center’s assistant director, added that current government fire regulations require that no more than 300 cubic feet of records can be stored without firewall protection. “The system works,” Mr. Levins said. “In recent years, there have been several fires in government offices in Washington, D.C., and the damage has always been confined to much less than 300 cubic feet.”
That’s little solace to one World Wear II Navy veteran and his wife. The 80-year-old Indiana resident, who asked not to be identified, took part in South Pacific combat operations on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In June 1945, he was in a landing craft attached to his ship during a raging typhoon. Violently thrown from side of the craft to the other, he suffered severe back and knee injuries that would affect him the rest of his life.
“It [the pain] got worse over the years,” the veteran said, “but I put up with it until I finally filed for service connected medical benefits in 1980. The first time I ever heard about the fire was when I received a letter denying my claim. They said my records were destroyed. I was so disgusted that I dropped the whole thing. I never followed up on it; I just dropped it. I thought the government should have had more than one set of records,” he continued, “but I wasn’t angry. Just disappointed.”
Today, the combat veteran says he can “still get around,” but he’s in intense pain and now going deaf in one ear. The Veterans’ Administration told him it might be able to reopen his claim for medical benefits, but he’s skeptical. “The only thing I got from my military service was my GI Bill benefits,” he said. “I guess I need some witnesses, but a bunch of dead Marines don’t make very good witnesses.”
According to Scott Levins, the NPRC’s assistant director, it may still be possible for veterans to get their records even if they were damaged in the fire.
The center receives more than one million requests each year for military records,” Mr. Levins said, “and many of those are requests to reconstruct records that were lost in the 1973 fire. The number is dwindling as the years go by, but we still have enough requests to staff 30 full-time employees. Reconstruction efforts will go on indefinitely.”
William G. Seibert, the center’s chief archivist, added, “The fire was in 1973 but we’re still responding today. Unfortunately, we know what records we’ve recovered, but we still don’t really know what we lost.”
