Military records being moved to new St. Louis Storage facility

According to a recent news release from the St. Louis Economic Council, the National Archives and Records Administration's National Personnel Records Center will relocate more than 100 million records to a new $112 million modernized facility. Crews broke ground on the 474,000 square-foot facility last November. Located in North St. Louis County, Mo., the facility will open its doors next May, which is also when the work force of 800 will start moving in. The entire move of personnel and records will take about 17 months. The new location will store approximately 2.3 million cubic feet of records currently housed at three different St. Louis area facilities. The building will be certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design program and will also be compliant with the stringent Federal standards for archival and non-archival records. Records will be housed in climate-controlled stack areas designed for long-term preservation. Archival storage bays will have particulate and ultraviolet filtration. Paint, sealants, caulking and the powder-coated finishes for the shelving will be certified for minimal off-gassing of volatile organic compounds. The facility also will offer new research rooms, meeting rooms equipped with the latest video-conferencing technology and tenant office space for other area Federal agencies. Several move teams are working to ensure that each and every record is accounted for during the move and that important services to veterans continue with little delay. Many of the records are currently stored on 10-high shelving units in an old 1950s facility in Overland, Mo., which was ravaged by a 1973 fire that was one of the worst in U.S. history. The fire destroyed the building's sixth floor and an estimated 16-18 million individual military personnel records. The records lost include those of Army personnel discharged between Nov. 1, 1912, and Dec. 31, 1959, and Air Force personnel discharged between Sept. 25, 1947, and Dec. 31, 1963, with names alphabetically following Hubbard, James. Some records were salvaged from the disaster; these fire-damaged records have been stored in a climate-controlled area where specially trained preservation technicians treat the records for mold and delicately piece together whatever they can save. Despite the very fragile state of the burned records, preservationists have been able to retrieve valuable information in an effort to reconstruct portions of a service member's personnel file. At the current facility the Preservation Branch also treats several thousand records that have been exposed to the harmful rays of the sun and to other contaminants that shorten a record's life span. The National Archives at St. Louis is only one of 44 NARA facilities located throughout the United States. However, unlike other collections, these records impact nearly every family in the country. These holdings represent a priceless piece of history and are a critical source of information for genealogists, family members, scholars, veterans and researchers.