![]() ![]() But arson was already front and center.Īn investigation found there had been 11 fires in the two and a half years leading up to the conflagration. The search for a cause would be daunting. So much water was poured on the fire that holes had to be knocked in the outer walls to let it drain eventually, bulldozers were hoisted onto the fifth floor, and what was left of the top story was shoved off the side. It had burned so hot that steel-reinforced concrete columns on the sixth floor buckled, portions of the collapsed roof slab supported only by file cabinets. The fire was not declared officially extinguished until the morning of July 16. Louis, after a massive fire that started on July 12, 1973. ![]() ![]() This photo provided by the National Archives and Records Administration shows the damaged sixth floor and roof of the Military Personnel Records Center in Overland, Mo., near St. Neither he nor two other custodians who later joined him on the freight elevator reported smelling smoke “or seeing any signs of fire,” the report said. ![]() It had too much fuel.”Īccording to a GSA investigation, janitor John Staufenbiel was the last person known to have been on the sixth floor. “There was nothing that was going to stop it, that fire. “There was a glow from the top of that building that was just, I mean, it was right up against the clouds,” says Buttery. “And a wall of smoke moving behind him faster than he could run.”Įlmore, Buttery and the others watched from a grassy hill as the windows exploded. “I saw Terry running back towards the very door I had just opened with a scared look on his face,” Elmore says. He followed, hoping to reach the firehoses near the escalators. The man, whom a guard described as having “long hippie-type hair,” shouted that smoke was pouring out of the upper floor windows.Įlmore noticed a fellow janitor and veteran, Terry Davis, sprinting up the stairs. The former Air Force crew chief, who was working there under a veteran readjustment program, was nearing the end of his eight-hour shift when he overheard a man pounding on the doors. “Basically, from the floor to the ceiling.” “All that paper was packed in cardboard boxes on metal shelving,” says Bill Elmore, a janitor assigned to the sixth floor. “It was so hot and so dry,” Buttery says of the file areas. There were some sprinklers on the first and second floors, but none in the stacks, and no firewalls between records storage areas. Walker and Stender, then assistant archivist for the records centers, said the 1.6 million-square-foot building “reflected careful planning.” But “in actual function,” they concluded, “it was not a successful records center.” By the time of the fire, the military records center and a nearby one for civilian records had been merged into the National Personnel Records Center. “The building, 728 feet long, 282 feet wide, six stories high, presents an impassive façade to the world with its rather bland curtain wall of glass and aluminum.”īuilt for the Department of Defense in 1956, the facility was later turned over to the National Archives and Records Service, then part of the General Services Administration. Louis suburban community of Overland where the building rises on a seventy-acre site,” they wrote. “The sheer bulk alone makes a strong impression on the viewer, and the vast scale tends to overwhelm the quiet St. ![]()
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