The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster

Abstract

FIRES, FLOODS, AND EARTHQUAKES have robbed us of many of the legacies of the past.Fires, especially, have destroyed many historical records.Around 2200 B.C. records offices in Memphis, Egyptian capital of the Sixth Dynasty, were destroyed by angry mobs.The sacking of Rome destroyed much of the written record of that great civilization.The wars of the twentieth century brought disaster to great cultural assets including libraries and art galleries.In the United States several major fires in federal government buildings consumed important records and art objects.On November 8, 1800, a fire in the War Department robbed historians of much of the record of this department for the first decade of this nation's history.Vital materials relating to the fiscal activities of this country were destroyed in an 1833 fire in the Treasury Department.When the Patent Office burned in 1836, valuable records and significant models of the inventions which helped to shape the industrial might of the United States were destroyed.Significant paintings and other historical relics disappeared in the flames of an 1851 fire in the U.S. Capitol.Social scientists and demographers always will mourn the loss of the records of the 1890 Decennial Census lost in a 1921 fire in the Census Bureau.Each of these fires helped to diminish the cultural heritage of this nation.But in terms of size and impact-the number of records destroyed and the number of persons affected-none of the earlier fires equalled the disaster of July 12, 1973, at the National Personnel Records Center in Overland, Missouri.As it exists today, the National Personnel Records Center is the outgrowth of several previous organizations.The center reflects a belief on the part of the National Archives and Records Service that all personnel records of former federal government employees, both civilian and military, should be housed in and serviced by one administrative unit.The civilian personnel records are in a building in South St. Louis constructed in i960 as a general purpose federal records Walter Stender is Assistant Archivist for Federal Records Centers, National Archives and Records Service.Evans Walker is a staff member of the same office.

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