In Kansas, the Salt of Earth Safeguards Buried Treasures

Calling this contraption an elevator is being charitable.

It’s a cramped cage, really, with a flapping plywood back, and it’s suspended by what looks like a massive upside-down coat hanger. It’s filthy. And it’s way beyond dark: It’s black inside, completely black, as it descends for a full anxious minute--lurching and rumbling down, down, down until it creaks to a bumpy stop.

It’s not very welcoming, that’s for sure.

And that’s exactly the point.

For the only place this elevator goes is a high-security cavern--an unusual warehouse crammed full of treasures about 650 feet beneath the Kansas prairie.

Here in a salt mine, a local firm, Underground Vaults & Storage, has built quite a business keeping important stuff safe. Tornadoes can’t touch its vault burrowed the equivalent of 60 stories underground. Floods cannot permeate the thick shelf of salt that doubles as the warehouse ceiling. There are no seismic faults nearby that anyone knows of.

Plus, the mine naturally retains a year-round temperature and humidity considered nearly ideal for preserving paper and film.

So it is that secret government documents, hospital X-rays and generations of records from insurance providers, banks and international corporations all end up here, under a heartland wheat field.

So it is too that the original prints and discarded outtakes of Hollywood history--from Charlie Chaplin to “Gone With the Wind” to “Star Wars” and beyond--have landed in a town where the skyline consists of a peeling grain elevator.

And so it is that these salt deposits, formed 230 million years ago, now are being wired for the 21st century. High-speed data cables have been tugged through this prehistoric salt lick so that executives worldwide can tap into the CD-ROMs and floppy disks they stash here. Once the technology upgrade is complete, warehouse employees should be able to scan corporate records onto underground computers and zap them over the Internet in seconds, giving a Swiss bank or an oil rig off China instant access to data tucked in a Kansas cavern.

The original documents, meanwhile, will remain buried here, salted away in what Lee Spence, president of Underground Vaults, calls “one of the safest places in the world.”

That it may be. Yet such a boast raises the question: Do firms these days really need top security for their records?

Now that most data can be stored, duplicated and transported on computer disk, “a lot of companies just put several copies of disks in different locations,” relying on redundancy to safeguard their records, said Scott BeVier, vice president of BMS Catastrophe Inc., which helps firms recover data wiped out by disasters.

Even so, every computer disk is usually accompanied by a paper printout, as electronic data can become scrambled or fade over time. People even tend to print out their e-mail so they’ll have something tangible to file. And when it comes to storing these hard copies--or, for that matter, original computer disks--”the first thing firms want would obviously be security,” said Patti Fitzgerald of Disaster Recovery Journal, a St. Louis-based trade magazine.

“Your business,” she explained, “is only as good as your last backup.”

So underground vaults retain a certain allure.

To be sure, they’re not immune to disaster: A few years back, a fire broke out in a Kansas City cave used to store--along with documents--cooking oil and kegs of beer. There wasn’t enough oxygen to feed an all-out blaze, but the embers smoldered on and on, out of reach of firefighters. Eventually, warehouse managers had to seal the cave for good, leaving most of the papers inside to burn.

Such horror stories, however, are rare, and underground storage continues to be popular, with warehouses opening in railroad tunnels, surplus military bunkers, even old missile silos. One top-secret government vault in a Pennsylvania limestone mine boasts armed guards and a 10-ton iron gate.

The Hutchinson salt mine, although not as well armored, has its own unique draw: It’s farther underground than any other warehouse, and there’s only one way in.

Most subterranean storage, including the Pennsylvania mine, can be reached via horizontal shafts wide enough to drive a trailer truck through. In Hutchinson, there’s only a skinny vertical shaft--and there’s only one way to descend it. You step into the elevator, squash close to your companions and try to keep your balance through the long shimmy down, swallowing hard to pop your ears and blinking now and then against the grit of falling salt crystals.

“Until you’re going down that shaft, bumping against the walls, you can’t really understand” just how isolated the vault is, said David Grant, director of library services for 20th Century Fox, which stores its film and TV archives in the mine. “You’d have to be a pretty good burglar to find what you wanted to steal and get it out of there.”

For all the excitement of the journey down, the vault looks almost disappointingly ordinary.

It’s clean and well-lighted, stocked with vending machines and a microwave. The whitewashed ceiling is 11 feet high, so there’s no need to stoop, except at the entrance--deliberately left low, Spence said, “to keep the effect that you’re still underground.” Winter or summer, it’s always a comfy 68 degrees, with a humidity of 45%.

There are quirks, of course: Employees move about the vast storage bays (each the size of a football field) on bikes, electric scooters or golf carts. There are no windows. The walls taste of salt. So does your skin after a long day underground being dusted by drifting crystals.

Worst of all, the elevator returns “topside” only a few times a day, so employees can’t dash out to run an errand or swing by a kid’s softball game. Even doctor appointments must be carefully timed.

(There are exceptions for emergencies, like the time Spence’s wife went into labor and insisted the baby wouldn’t wait until he could catch the next scheduled ride to the surface.)

Those employees who can deal with the inconvenience say they rather enjoy working underground. True, they have to lug around oxygen canisters in case of disaster, and flashlights for power failures. On the other hand, the close quarters foster camaraderie. And there’s a beauty to the sparkling salt deposits, streaked here and there with dark shells left over from the vast inland sea that once covered most of Kansas.

“The salt is so pretty, the way it glistens on the walls, that you feel very safe and comfortable here,” said Caryl Davis, a data clerk who has worked in the warehouse for 20 years. “I find it relaxing. I get almost mesmerized by it.”

There’s also the thrill of working around history.

On one shelf, you might find original negatives of “The Simpsons.” On another, prints of “MASH”--every single episode. Elvis films. “Casablanca.” In this box, appropriately enough: “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

“All here, in Hutchinson, Kansas,” marveled records clerk Chris Hall.

Studios ship archives here not only for security but also because the mine’s climate can preserve color film for hundreds of years. (The ideal environment would be a bit colder, so some studios store their most precious prints in air-conditioned warehouses above ground.) Along with film history, the hollowed-out mine holds an eclectic assortment of personal treasures, including coin collections, rare Bibles, wedding dresses, a sinister-looking antique doctor’s table and a historic McDonald’s sign that was once a Kansas landmark. Anything that can fit on the elevator (or be chopped up and reassembled below) can be stored here for an annual fee of $1.80 per cubic foot of space.

Founded during the Cuban missile crisis--and promoted as a natural fallout shelter for documents--the salt mine warehouse has grown steadily over the last four decades. Underground Vaults, which also operates a limestone storage cave in Kansas City, boasts 1,700 customers from around the world, with gross sales reaching $8 million a year.

There’s plenty of room to expand too: The warehouse takes up just 26 of 800 available acres. And miners continue to extract 1,000 tons of salt a day for use in livestock feed, road de-icers and tanneries.

So there’s ample space beneath the Kansas plains to keep stashing valuables and safeguarding secrets. Including a few that Spence would just as soon keep buried forever.

“I know my name is [filed] down here somewhere,” he explained with a grin. “We store records of speeding tickets.”