![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. Stender and Evans Walker, who were with the Federal Records Centers, wrote in a 1974 article in The American Archivist titled, “The National Personnel Records Center: A Study in Disaster.” “Its size is difficult to comprehend, even when one is inside,” Walter W. If the records center was meant to inspire awe, mission accomplished. ![]()
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