Inside This Mountain, Old Films Live Forever
April 30, 2015 - Where do National Geographic and major motion picture studios store their most important films? At a secure storage site, known as Iron Mountain, which is housed in a huge, repurposed mine in rural western Pennsylvania. Here, film reels for old movies—such as Jane Goodall and the Wild Chimps—are kept in temperature-controlled "vaults," where they are preserved for future generations to enjoy. In this video, take a rare tour of the facility and get an eerie look at its Cold War roots.
Transcript
Tom Benjamin, Vital Records Executive, Iron Mountain:
Underground is good for the records. We’ve got a constant
temperature, a constant relative humidity, and the seasons don’t change. A lot
of folks when they come here, perhaps yourself included, they have a- a
preconceived notion. Going underground,--
--the roof is gonna be very low, there’s gonna be
stalagmites and stalactites. You know, and that’s in a cave, certainly, this is
a mine.
So this is a hundred percent man made, and we try to create
an office environment, a work environment, that’s gonna be comfortable for the
couple thousand folks that come here every day.
1950’s Narrator:
Let us face, without panic, the reality of our time. The
fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities.
Tom Benjamin
It was at the peak of the Cold War and the Russians had the
bomb, we had the bomb, folks were concerned of nuclear attack.
So the defence industry went to their primary defence
contractor, who was US Steel, and said that you should take precautions for the
preservation of your vital information. So they set about the task of trying to
find what was then called a hardened location. Underground. And looked at
dozens of mines that US Steel operated and settled upon this one. The
facility that we’re in is enormous.
We operate now in about a hundred and forty five acres of
space. The mine, is about a thousand acres.
It’s really like an underground city. While we can’t get
into the details as to who the clients are, they certainly would include all of
the major motion picture film studios, as well as the studios that maintain
recorded sound. So if you listen to the radio or you’re watching television or
you go to the movies this weekend, there is an excellent chance that the
originals or uh, the masters would be stored underground at our facility. Our
clients come here because they’re looking for the protection of their
information.
They want it to be safe, and secure, and we try to maintain,
and they enjoy, that quiet enjoyment of the facility.
So here’s a good example of a temperature and humidity
controlled vault. It’s a small area, there’s a small dehumidification unit on
the right hand side. But this particular customer, uh, only needs the
temperature that mother nature gives us. So there’s not a, uh, refrigeration
unit that’s hooked up to this.
This is a new area that we’re developing for the
installation of generators. You can see on the left hand side, we’ve got one
generator installed. So these generators, there’s twenty six of them and
they’re only used for normal backup purposes. So in the case of- of
National Geographic, their space--
--is maintained at fifty degrees fahrenheit, and a relative
humidity of around thirty percent. That’s great for the assets that are inside
there. And then they have another room, that uh, the temperature is thirty five
degrees, even colder. And we need a lot of HVAC equipment in order to achieve
those results. What’s inside there is determined by National Geographic, but I
suspect that it’s, uh, it’s really the crown jewels.
Don’t have anything frozen, don’t have anyone’s head inside
the facility uh, you know, we’re not offering those types of arrangements to
folks. So our focus is on business media information management--
Motion picture film or video tape, audio tape paper records.
The emergency relocation site was a theme in the early
fifties. Um, not as much anymore as we’ve morphed into a site where we’re able
to leverage the advantages of being underground; which is the stable
environment, and the security of the single point to come into the facility and
go out.
We’re not really open to the public, we’re not really
accepting folks with open arms in the event that there would be a disaster of
some sort outside there.
Tony Gerber, Producer (off camera):
So in the event of the zombie apocalypse, you’re, you’re
safe?
Tom Benjamin:
I think we’re safe, yes, I think we’re safe. [Laughs]