iron mountain atomic storage

I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers, and hardened telephone exchanges were all sold to the highest bidder or---often in the case of missile silos---offered at a fixed price to the surrounding land owner. Many of them ended up sealed, the new owner only being interested in the surface property. But others...

There are numerous examples of ex-defense facilities with more ambitious owners. There ought to be some commercial interest in a hardened, underground facility, right? After all, the investment to build them was substantial. Perhaps a data center?

There are several ways this goes wrong. First, there are not actually that many data center clients who will pay extra to put their equipment underground. That's not really how modern disaster recovery plans work. Second, and probably more damning, these ventures often fail to anticipate the enormous cost of renovating an underground facility. Every type of construction is more expensive when you do it underground, and hardened facilities have thick, reinforced concrete walls that are difficult to penetrate. Modernizing a former hardened telecom site or, even worse, missile site for data center use will likely cost more than constructing a brand new one. Indeed, the military knows this: that's why they just sold them, often at rock-bottom prices.

Even if these "secure datacenters" almost never succeed (and rarely even make it to a first paying client), they've provided a lot of stories over the years. CyberBunker, one of the less usual European examples (a former NATO facility), managed to become entangled in cybercrime and the largest DDoS attack ever observed at the time, all while claiming to be an independent nation. They were also manufacturing MDMA, and probably lying about most of the equipment being in a hardened facility to begin with.

So that's obviously a rather extreme example, sort of a case study in the stranger corners of former military real estate and internet crime. But just here in New Mexico I know of at least two efforts to adopt Atlas silos as secure datacenters or document storage facilities, neither of which got off the ground (or under the ground, as it were). It seems like a good idea until, you know, you actually think about it. You might recall that I wrote about a secure data center claiming to be located in a hardened facility with CIA and/or SDI ties. That building doesn't even appear to have been hardened at all, and they still went bankrupt.

What if I told you that they were all barking up the wrong tree? If you really want to make a business out of secure underground storage, you need something bigger and with better access. You need a mine.

It will also be very important to make this play in the early Cold War, when there was a much clearer market for hardened facilities, as evidenced by the military spending that period building them rather than selling them off. The 1980s and on were just too late.

There are actually several rather successful businesses built on the premise of secure, hardened storage, and they are distinctively pre-computer. The best known of them is diversified "information management" firm Iron Mountain. You know, with the shredding trucks. And an iron mountain, or rather, an iron mine by that name.

Like most of the large underground facilities that are still commercially successful today, the story of Iron Mountain involves mushrooms. Efficient cultivation of mushrooms requires fairly tightly controlled conditions that are not dissimilar to those you already find underground: cool temperatures, high humidity, and low light. Culinary mushrooms are widely produced in large caves and former mines, which often provide more convenient access, having been designed for bulk transportation of ores.

This might be a little surprising, because we tend to think of underground mines as being small, cramped spaces. That's true of many mines, often for precious metals, for example. But there are also mines that extract ores that are present over large areas and have relatively low value. This requires an efficient method of removing a very large quantity of rock. Modern mines employ some very clever techniques, like "block caving," where a very large rock mass is intentionally collapsed into a prepared chamber that it can be scooped out of like the bottom of a hopper. One of the most common methods, though, and one that has been in use for a very long time, is "room and pillar" mining.

The idea is pretty simple: you excavate a huge room, leaving pillars to hold up the material above. Depending on the economics, geology, etc., you might then "retreat," digging out the pillars behind you as you work your way out of the room. This causes the room to collapse, ideally away from the working area, but not always. Retreat mining is dangerous and doesn't always produce ore of that much value, so a lot of mines didn't do it. They just left the rooms, and their pillars: huge underground chambers, tens and hundreds of thousands of square feet, empty space. Many were dug back into a hill or mountain, providing direct drive-in access via adits. Most, almost all, successful underground storage facilities are retired room and pillar mines.

In the first-half of the 20th century, mushroom cultivation was the most common application of underground space. That's what led "Mushroom King" Herman Knaust to purchase the disused Mt. Thomas iron mine near Livingston, NY in 1936. Knaust's company, Knaust's Cavern Mushrooms, was the largest producer of culinary mushrooms in the world. Ten crops of mushrooms were produced each year in the Livingston mine, and as Knaust continued to grow his operations, the mushroom mine became one of the area's principal employers. Knaust dubbed it Iron Mountain.

By 1950, things had changed. Knaust had at least two motivations for his pivot: first, the US mushroom industry was rapidly weakening, upset by lower-cost mushrooms imported from Europe and Asia. Second, WWII had come to a close, and the Cold War was beginning.

In 1952, Knaust told reporters of his experience working with refugees from Europe resettled in New York. Most of them had lost everything to bombing, and they told Knaust how they had attempted to hide their most valuable possessions, and their paperwork, in safer places. The Germans, Knaust read, had come up with the best hiding place of all: disused mines. During the course of the war, the Nazi administration stored valuables ranging from gold bullion to original works of art in former mines throughout their occupied territories. Some of them were large-scale logistical operations, with rail access and organized archival systems.

Now, in the age of nuclear weapons, Knaust thought that this kind of protection would be in more demand than ever. In 1951, he renovated the old mine and installed new ventilation equipment. Most importantly, he bought a 28-ton vault door secondhand from a failed bank. A generator and a security force of armed former police officers rounded out Knaust's new venture: Iron Mountain Atomic Storage.

The bank vault door was mostly for show, and Knaust's description of the mine as "A-bomb proof" and "radiation proof" somewhat stretch the science. But Knaust was a born marketer; his version of nuclear alarmism drew the attention of corporate America like the Civil Defense Administration's pamphlets gripped the public. The entrance to his mine was a sturdy stone block building with iron bars over the windows and "Atomic Storage Vaults" inscribed at the top. He was sure to tell reporters of his estate, home to the world's only mushroom-shaped swimming pool. Over the years of newspaper coverage, the bank vault door at the front of the mine got heavier and heavier.

In the event of a nuclear attack, Knaust reasoned, banks could lose their records of deposits. Insurers could lose track of their policies. Companies of all kinds could lose inventory sheets. The resulting economic chaos would be as destructive as the bomb that started it. If we were to shelter lives, we also needed to shelter information. By the time Iron Mountain Atomic Storage was open for business he had already signed up the first customers, who shipped copies of their records for storage in individual vaults constructed within chambers of the mine. The East River Savings Bank, of New York, proudly described how each of their branches microfilmed new deposits daily for transport to the Mountain.

Iron Mountain sold its services to individuals as well. For $2.50 a year, a consumer or small business could pack records into a tin can for storage in the mine. The cans could be stored or retrieved with local agents stationed in major cities, who sealed them in the presence of the customer and shipped them to the mine by courier.

By 1954, Iron Mountain boasted over 400 customers, mostly large corporations and institutions. It was a surprising hit with newspapers: about 150 rented space to store their archives. Recordak, a subsidiary of Kodak that provided microfilming services, set up a branch office at the mine with representatives who could convert records to microfilm or turn them back into full-sized versions on demand. The consumer part of the business was reorganized in partnership with the Railway Express Agency, one of the descendants and ancestors of our modern American Express and Wells Fargo. Individuals and small businesses could deposit records with any Railway Express agent and request records sent back to their nearest train station.

They quickly faced competition. Perhaps the most interesting was Western States Atomic Storage Vaults, who purchased a disused South Pacific Coast Railroad tunnel in the Santa Cruz mountains. The railroad right of way, near Zayante, California, received a similar conversion to caged storage units. At least a half dozen underground storage companies would be organized between 1950 and 1960.

The atomic storage industry was not always an easy one. Iron Mountain had a slow start, signing up few customers after their initial set of banks and newspapers. The Cuban Missile Crisis gave a considerable boost to sales, though, and revenue almost doubled in 1963 alone. Iron Mountain's inventory expanded from paper and microfilm records to original works of art, and they purchased a second mine, a former limestone mine nearby at Kingston, NY, to expand. They added office and dormitory facilities at both sites, to protect both their extensive staff of clerks and representatives of their customers in the event of nuclear war. "What good are the records if everyone in the firm is blown up," Iron Mountain's executive vice president offered.

Inside of Iron Mountain, behind the vault door, steel doors with combination locks protected individual vault suites ranging from closets to hundreds of square feet. Racks held boxes and cans of individual records deposited by smaller customers. The whole facility was maintained at 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50% humidity, a task greatly eased by the surrounding earth.

They were dedicated to the privacy of their customers but also had a hard time passing up an opportunity for promotion, telling reporters of some of the publishers and television companies that stored their archives at Iron Mountain, and hinting at a "major New York City art museum" that leased space for its collection. Individual customers included doctors, stamp collectors, and "a whole lot of people who aren't talking as long as the outside world lasts."

The mid-1960s were the apex of the Cold War in the popular consciousness, and Iron Mountain's luck would not last through the broader decline in planning for all-out Soviet attack. Now called Iron Mountain Security Storage, quotes for newspaper articles shifted their focus towards civil unrest. In a world of campus riots, president James Price said, universities were moving their academic records underground.

Iron Mountain's good (for business) and bad (for society) mood must have been infectious, because competitors flourished even in 1970. Bekins, the moving and storage company, purchased 200 acres in the Diablo mountains of California. They intended to open the first underground storage facility specifically built for that purpose, and plans included a hotel and heliport for convenient customer access. The July 11th, 1970 edition of The Black Panther's Black Community News Service contains perhaps them most blunt assessment of the Bekins plan, one that would prove prescient.

The possibility of World War III is not as much an immediate threat to the life and well being of America's greedy capitalists as is the strong probability of the more severe "political consequences" that might be meted out by the masses, the people, for selfish crimes committed against them.

A year later, the plan had expanded to shelter for 1,000 "executives and office workers" for up to 30 days, an airport that could serve business jets, and a computer and communications center. Bekins said that it would help corporations survive a nuclear war, but was even more important in the event of rioting or terrorism. Bekins specifically called out unrest at UC Berkeley, and damage it had caused to academic records, as evidence of the need.

Blaine L. Paris, number one stooge manager of Bekins Company.., acknowledged that the hideaway, hideout survival shelter's main draw is the widespread fear, on the business executive level, of bombings, the random tossing of molotov cocktails, possibilities of kidnapping...

Some large companies, Bekins said, were planning to set up alternate corporate headquarters in the facility as soon as it opened. It would be something like the Mount Weather of the corporate world. Two years passed, and Bekins reimagined the facility as a regular-use business park rather than a contingency site, but still underground. Joseph Raymond, Bekins' director of Archival Services, quipped that employees might be more productive underground where they'd be "free from the distractions of the surface."

Bekins had bad news coming. The era of atomic storage had come to an end. Corporate fear of popular revolution proved insufficient to fund the ten million dollar project. The Bekins facility would never break ground. Iron Mountain, quietly and under cover of their typical boosterism, had run out of money.

In 1971, a group of investors formed Schooner Capital and bought them out. Their strategy: to focus on business records management and compliance, and largely drop the "underground" and "atomic" part. Beginning in 1978, Iron Mountain built dozens of new storage facilities that were normal, above-ground warehouses. At the same time, they shifted the focus of their sales from security to "information management." New legal requirements and tax regulations meant that records retention had become a complex and costly part of many businesses; Iron Mountain offered to outsource the entire matter. Their clerks collected records from businesses, filed them away, and destroyed them when retention was no longer required.

Iron Mountain remains the largest company in the business today. Most US cities have an expansive Iron Mountain warehouse somewhere on their outskirts, and their mobile shredding trucks are a regular sight in business districts. Still, a certain portion of the Cold War attitude remains. Unshredded records are said to be transported in unmarked vehicles, to avoid attracting attention. Iron Mountain facilities are not exactly hidden, but their locations are not well publicized, and they continue to use armed guards. Distinctive red "Restricted Area" signs surround each one.

And they still have plenty underground.

When you look into the history of Iron Mountain, you will see frequent reference to the Corbis Collection. The story of Corbis would easily make its own article, but the short version is that Corbis was founded by Bill Gates as a sort of poorly-thought-out electronic picture frame company. Over the span of decades, they amassed one of the world's largest private collections of historic photographs and media, and then collapsed into an influencer marketing firm. It is often noted that the Corbis collection, of over 15 million photographs spanning 150 years, is stored at Iron Mountain. This isn't quite correct, but it's wrong in an interesting enough way to make it worth unpacking.

In the 1950s, the Northeast Pennsylvania Industrial Development Commission (NPIDC) formed a task force to investigate opportunities for the reuse of the state's growing number of abandoned coal mines. Coal is mined almost entirely by the room and pillar method, and while there are practical challenges in reusing coal mines in particular, the amount of space involved was considerable. The NPIDC's first proposal was right in line with the cold war: they proposed that the Civil Defense Administration use the mines to store their stockpiles of equipment and supplies.

The Civil Defense Administration wasn't interested, they were worried that firedamp (flammable coal gases) would make the mines dangerous and high humidity would cause stored equipment to rust. Still, the idea rattled around the state of Pennsylvania for years, and sometime around 1953 one such mine near Boyers, PA was purchased by the newly formed National Storage Company. National Storage became one of Iron Mountain's key competitors.

Iron Mountain has become as large as it is by following a fine American economic tradition: monopolization. It outlasted its erstwhile atomic storage competitors by buying them. Western States Atomic Storage Vaults and their railroad tunnel, National Storage and their coal mine, and at least two other similar ventures became part of Iron Mountain in the 1990s.

It is the former National Storage facility in Boyers that holds the Corbis collection. It has a notable neighbor: the largest tenant at Boyers is the United States Office of Personnel Management, which famously holds both clearance investigation files and federal employee retirement records down in the old mine. In 2014, the Washington Post called the Boyers mine a "sinkhole of bureaucracy", describing the 600 OPM employees who worked underground manually processing retirement applications. These employees, toiling away in a literal paperwork mine, were the practical result of a decades-long failed digitization program.

Underground storage is still a surprisingly large business. Some readers may be familiar with "SubTropolis," an extensive limestone mine near Kansas City, which offers 55 million square feet of underground space. SubTropolis has never particularly marketed itself as a hardened or secure facility. Instead, it offers very cost-effective storage space with good natural climate control. Tenants include refrigerated logistics companies and the National Archives. There are a number of facilities like it, particularly in parts of the eastern United States where the geography has been amenable to room and pillar mining.

That's the irony of Iron Mountain: their original plan was a little too interesting. Iron Mountain continues to operate multiple underground facilities, both their own and those they have acquired. Some of them, including Boyers, even have datacenters. The clients are mostly media companies, with original materials they cannot easily duplicate, and legacy government and financial records that would be too costly to digitize. Sony Music stores their studio masters with Iron Mountain, a big enough operation that some of Iron Mountain's underground sites have small recording studios to allow for restoration without removing the valuable originals from safekeeping. Miles of film are stored alongside miles of pension accounts. No one talks about nuclear war. The bigger fear is fire, which is more difficult to contain and fight in these old mines than in purpose-built archival warehouses.

There are only so many masters to store, and the physical volume of corporate records is quickly declining. Atomic vaults hit a limit to their growth. The total inventory of underground corporate storage facilities in the United States today is much the same as it was in the 1960s, with more closing than opening. Offsite records storage is shrinking overall, and Iron Mountain is effectively in the process of a pivot towards (above-ground) datacenters and services.

Still, when you read about Mark Zuckerberg's 5,000 square foot bunker in Hawaii, or Peter Thiel's planned underground project in New Zealand, one can't help but wonder if the predictions of Bekins, and the Black Panthers, were just ahead of their time.

I hope you enjoy this kind of material on Cold War defense and culture. It's one of my greatest interests besides, you know, anything underground. For those of you who support me on Ko-Fi, in the next day or two my supporter newsletter EYES ONLY will be a short followup to this piece. It will discuss underground storage facilities of a slightly different kind: the records vaults constructed by the Church of Scientology and the Latter-Day Saints, and the extent to which these facilities also reflect Cold War concerns.

I am also working on something about waste-to-energy facilities that will probably be an EYES ONLY article, as a companion to an upcoming CAB article on the history of an experimental Department of Energy biomass power plant in Albany, Oregon. But first, I will write something about computers. I have to every once in a while.