Section A·Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, April 12, 2000
Insurance worth its weight in salt
Lee Spence, president of Underground Vaults & Storage, Inc., reads the titles of some famous movies stored in the company's 26-acre underground facility.
Companies such as 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Walt Disney store thousands of canisters of original film, audio tracks, posters and props for safe keeping.
Continued from page 1A
Preserving memories
SALT MINE FACTS:
Some of the books and documents from the rare and special book microfilm and are stored beneath the Kansas earth, too, said William Crowe, Spencer Librarian.
The salt deposit being mined formed during the Permian Age when Kansas was covered in sand.
Underground Vaults
Storage, Inc. operates
in the Hutchinson Salt
Company ming.
Some of these books are hundreds of years old, with some dating back to the 1600s.
He said Spencer Research Library put books and documents on microfilm so people years from
Lee Spence shows off one of many boxes containing the original films and sound tracks of Gone With The Wind that are stored in the underground vaults. The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are among a few of the thousands of movies stored in the mine in addition to television shows like Ally McBeal and Bewitched.
There are large salt deposits in Salt Lake City, Detroit and Boston, but none of those salt mines have a climate or environment that is right for storing objects.
The mine was first developed in the 1920s.
The mine is 650 feet deep — the same as the height of a 65-story building or six Fraser Halls stacked on top of one another.
The salt is mined using dynamite and specialized chain sows.
128th Class The Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis sparked the growth of Underground Vaults & Storage Inc.
A number of earthquakes in late 1980s and early 1990s in California prompted Hollywood to send a tremendous amount of film to Hushpuppy.
Underground Vaults & Storage, Inc., has about 1,500 clients.
Currently, the mine is 97 percent full, but Underground Vaults & Storage continually expands into undeveloped areas that have been abandoned by miners.
Everything that goes into the mine, including vehicles, earth movers, forklifts, and goods to be stored must go by way of an elevator shaft that is approximately 10 feet by 10 feet. If the items are larger, they must be disassembled or cut apart for the journey down and reassembled in the mine.
The mine still uses the original elevators and shaft first made in the 1920s
The cable that lifts the counterbalanced elevators is about 1,400 feet long, one inch in diameter, and is replaced
about three times a year.
The cement Underground Vaults & Storage pours on the floor must be made in the mine with the use of mortar-mixers, not cement trucks. Instead of sand, the cement is made using crushed salt.
now would have a record of what happened.
Moreover, he said the University archives information on microfilm in the Hutchinson mine to keep records of personal experience and to ensure that future generations of students would have the same vintage resources that today's students have.
"When today's students have grandchildren at the University of Kansas and they want to know what happened with the evolution debate of 2000, they won't have to read a book written during their time by some guy," he said. "They can read then what happened with the debate now. The best thing to do is to try to get evidence as close as possible to the source so people can make their own judgments."
Crowe said the library has records from the University Daily Kansan, the Laurence Journal-World and state and government records.
Cheap, fool-proof insurance
The University library system has three copies of every microfilm, Baird said.
There is the master copy in the salt mine, a print master that the University uses to make copies and a copy that is for use in the libraries.
The University receives grant money to help store the microfilm. And this insurance policy against disaster is relatively cheap. He said the libraries spend less than $300 a year on storing the microfilm in the salt mine.
To get to the microfilm, you need to put on a hard hat, strap on a self-rescue — a five-pound device, similar to what scuba divers use, that provides clean air to breathe in case of a fire — and descend 650 feet into the earth by way of the
77-year-old elevator, which also hoists tons of salt.
Down in the salt mine, the temperature is a constant 68 degrees and the humidity is always 50 percent - a perfect condition for storing film, Spence said.
The salt mine is so ideal for storing film that Hollywood stores all of its negatives, from the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars to episodes of Doogie Houser, M.D. and B-movies that most people have probably never seen. Spence said.
Warner Bros. has five to six bays of film stored in the mine. Each bay is 15,000 square feet — roughly a size of a football field.
While the storage building is 26 acres in area, the mine itself is many times larger. The company still mines the salt, but the storage division and the active part of the mine are separated by a vast, empty vein of darkness. The only light comes from worker's flashlights and the lit storage bays.
The University does not occupy much space in the salt mine. It needs only a few drawers to store its 400 rolls of microfilm along with microfilm from banks, architecture companies and cities.
"The problem with the things we have is it's hard to put a financial
value on them," Crowe said. "Most of them are one-of-a-kind, so they can't be tested on the market, so we don't know what they're worth.
Though the University backs up its rare books and documents on microfilm, it does not insure them.
When it's "one-of-a-kind"
"But we aren't concerned about insuring them anyway, because we're not concerned about their financial value. They are one-of-a-kind. It's not like we can replace them if we lost them and we're not going to sell them, either."
The Spencer Museum of Art, on the other hand, insures some of its art and also stores in the mine anything that is not on display in the museum, said Andrea Norris, director of the art museum.
She said at any given time nearly 900 pieces will be displayed in the museum, but about 19,000 items are in storage at a secret location.
Though it may seem a bit extravagant to store microfilm 200 miles away from campus in a salt mine, the University registrar is even more compulsive in the way he preserves student transcripts.
every grade sheet every teacher has ever turned in to the University since the first classes in the late 1800s, said Richard C. Morrell. University registrar.
Some students — and wannabe-
students — may wish he cared a little less.
The permanent record
The registrar's office has
It has constructed an elaborate
web of safety nets. If anything were to happen to the records in its office on the first floor of Strong Hall, it has transcripts saved in four different media in four different places:
It has every transcript from 1978 to 1990 backed up electronically and on hard copy and stored off camcum:
- Transcripts for the last 10 years are backed up electronically on magnetic tape at the computer center.
Every transcript from 1990 to today also is on file in the form of a hard copy in the Strong Hall:
The Registrar's office also stores backup records at an undisclosed location in Kansas City.
The Kansas City records location is another secret.
"Id tell where the location is, but it's not a locked and secured place." Morrell said. "It isn't even in a building. There are enough copies and redundancies of the transcripts out there that it doesn't need the added expense of being in a locked and guarded place."
He would say the transcripts are not in the limestone caves of Kansas City, where, coincidentally, Underground Vaults & Storage Inc. operates another storage facility.
The transcripts from the last decade fill 45 filing cabinet drawers in a room that is akin to a bank vault. The vault is fire and waterproof and has a thick steel door
The purpose of the offcampus site? "If a tornado swept through Lawrence and destroyed all of the buildings and students' records." Morrell explained.
guarding the entrance.
That's a good thing, because a transformer that exploded in early February sat directly underneath the window of the registrar's office. Had the flames from the fire shot a little higher, there's a good chance the vault's flame and water protection would have been tested.
Why does the University goes to such lengths to keep its students' records safe?
"The academic record of students who have attended here is really a product of the University," Morrell said. "Banks take great precaution to safeguard all of their money." We're in the academic achievement business. This is our prized possession."
Apparently, academic achievement is something some people try to counterfeit.
"Employers will call with job applicants who have claimed to have a degree or completed course work for KU," he said. "They've most often told the employer that we've lost their records, but that isn't so. They tell us that we lost their record, too. But, when we ask for their name, the correct transcript, or no transcript at all, comes up."
Morrell said he knew of people who had lost their jobs, or not gotten jobs, because they lied about completing a degree or course work at the University.
He said the Registrar's office completed a study last year that found it had two to three fraudulent claims per week.
It turns out that the permanent record students have been hearing about since elementary school are just that; permanent.
— Edited by Chris Borniger
— Designed by Matt Daugherty
More than 100 boxes of master film and audio tracks for the 20th Century Fox movie Independence Day wait in an underground corridor for workers to place in their permanent homes on shelves in the mine.
Underground Vaults & Storage, Inc., continually expands, transforming rough, mined areas into suitable storage areas to accommodate customers in the movie industry.