12 July 1973

 

When it comes to genealogy research, two dates really stand out due to the repercussions left in their wake. 

1. 20 Jan 1921 - The date a fire started in the U.S. Department of Commerce building destroying almost the entire 1890 Census record.

2. 12 July 1973 - The date when a fire started on the 6th floor of the National Personnel Records Center destroying millions of records being stored there at the time comprising 80% of all army records and 75% of all air force records. 

This post is about the 2nd fire.

The first calls about the fire came in only minutes past midnight on July 12th stating that the 6th floor of the building was on fire and firefighters were quickly dispatched. They fought the fire for nearly 3 hours before having to withdraw due to heat and smoke and then pretty much let it burn for the next 22 hours before trying again to put the fire out. Forty-two fire districts got involved pumping water onto the flames from outside the building and sometime on July 14th, finally re-entered the building to pump even more water which finally extinguished the fire on July 16th, four days after it started. The cause of the fire, though investigated even as the fire was still burning, was never determined.

National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis - July 1973

The building was supposed to be state of the art when it was built but had two major flaws. It had been actually lobbied against having a sprinkler system due to fears that leaks or accidental activations of the system would destroy records. It also contained no fire walls to contain the fire to smaller portions of the building. As a result, after the fire trucks left, the 6th floor was a complete mess with a collapsed roof and charred records wetted with millions of gallons of water. Although not charred, many records on the 5th floor, also suffered from water and smoke damage. 

Acting quickly, ramps on the outside of the building were erected and 90,000 cubic feet of records were removed to tents set up outside where they started spraying the records with a thymol solution to prevent mold growth and putting them in milk crates on racks to dry in the air and sun. But this process was slow and overwhelming and so other solutions were sought.

They ended up settling on using vacuum chambers at nearby McDonnell Douglas which had built them for the Apollo space program. By putting 2000 milk crates of records inside, lowering the temperature under vacuum and then rapidly increasing the temperatures, they could remove something like 8 tons of water. They were safe from mold at that time but still charred and water damaged

Numbers have always been vague as to the true extent of the damage. This is mostly because these records had not yet been indexed, microfilmed or duplicated in any way and so they really don't even know what was there to start with. Efforts to preserve the records still continue to this day as new technologies become available and people request for records. But for millions of others such as the records I requested many years ago, were simply gone in a pile of ashes never to be read again.