Mine Allows Businesses to Salt Away Valuables

HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Every weekday near this small city in the middle of Kansas, 70 workers ride an elevator to their jobs 650 feet beneath a wheat farm.

They’re not miners, but rather keepers of government, corporate and personal records and artifacts from 50 states and 30 foreign nations. And business in these old salt mines is booming.

This year, Underground Vault & Storage Inc., operator of the “maximum-security” storage facility, will have revenue of nearly $2.5 million, 2 1/2 times that of just three years ago.

“Growing concern about the possibility of fire, storm, floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters, coupled with the ever-increasing threat of terrorist activities in recent years, has increased the demand for our services,” explained Mike Gingerich, 45, president of the 27-year-old company.

Many corporations, he noted, are now sending daily duplicate computer tapes so that in the event of a disaster, there will be virtually no gap in their records.

Also stored in the abandoned salt mine caverns are thousands of reels of movie and television films and videotapes from Hollywood production companies as well as a wide variety of individual and company treasures.

A quarter of everything held for safekeeping comes from Southern California, the bulk of it from movie and aerospace firms. Houston ranks second with 15%, primarily magnetic tapes, seismograph recordings, charts and business records of oil companies.

Records and other items are stored in 13 football field-size areas and a dozen smaller rooms maintained in a year-round atmosphere of 68 degrees and 50% relative humidity.

It has taken 27 years since the company was founded by six Wichita businessmen to fill 10 acres of horizontal shafts from which salt was removed. Another 10 acres prepared to store new material is expected to be filled within five years.

They aren’t running out of space, however. Miles of abandoned Carey Salt Co. shafts are still available. Carey is removing 250,000 tons of salt a year from the 40-mile-wide, 100-mile-long underground deposit. The company has been mining salt beneath Hutchinson since 1923.

Sandi Williamson, 30, manager of records administration for Columbia Pictures, and Grover Crisp, 36, the company’s supervisor of film services, flew to Hutchinson from Burbank recently and were deep in the salt mines reviewing the studio’s stored materials.

“We have 42,000 cartons filled with prints, outtakes, trims, magnetic sound tracks, scripts, posters, company records and other material stored here,” Williamson said. “If we need a film or something off the shelf, we phone directly to the office here in the mine. It can be on a plane the same day.”

Crisp and Williamson were in the salt mine on a routine review of Columbia materials, deciding which items were no longer needed and checking space availability. “We use the salt mine because this is the safest and most cost-efficient place we know,” Crisp said.

Columbia, Lorimar, MGM/UA, 20th Century Fox and many other movie and TV companies have been storing films and more recently videotape here since the facility was first used as the nation’s deepest underground warehouse.

Prints of classic films such as “The Wizard of Oz” and “Lost Horizon” are kept at ideal temperature and humidity along with thousands of other films, including 360 copies of “Gone With the Wind.”

Reels of “Dr. Zhivago” dubbed in Japanese are in one carton, “Singing in the Rain” in Chinese in another. Prints of Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club” series and the “Batman” series are stored here.

“We get peculiar requests,” Gingerich said. “One man wanted to store secret documents only two persons would be authorized to retrieve, himself and Jesus Christ.”

The American Bible Society has 1,700 Bibles buried in the mine, each one in a different language or dialect. There are also priceless paintings and valuable stamp and coin collections, and a Kansas City woman has kept her wedding dress down there for 18 years.

The company says it has a total of 15,000 depositors, some of whom pay as little as $120 a year for 80 cubic feet. Corporations, on the other hand, sometimes pay more than $100,000 a year for much larger spaces.

Stepping out of the elevator 650 feet underground is like entering the office of a large company. Employees work at computer terminals; phones are ringing. In the storage areas, workers drive or push carts loaded with boxes of records and other materials going to and from storage bays.

Fluorescent lights bounce off glistening salt rock floors, walls and ceilings. Fresh air is pumped in from above. Hand-held emergency breathing equipment is carried or kept close at hand should the air supply be cut off.

“It’s nice down here. We don’t fight the heat in summer, the cold in winter. And surprisingly, we seem to be healthier than people working above ground,” said Mike Leatherbury, 29, an “undergrounder” for three years.

But Larry Wintamute, 37, an assistant supervisor for 12 years, acknowledges that some new employees often quit soon after starting work.

“They get claustrophobia. They just don’t like the idea of working in a place where they’re buried under 650 feet of salt.”