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I just watched a story about the archived records of US Government employees being stored in an Iron Mountain storage facility, 200 feet underground in a Pennsylvania limestone mine. It’s all manual. Paper records in manila folders. A process designed in the 1970s. Apparently Obama spent over 100 MILLION dollars to revamp this process and failed. Unbelievable, right? Oh, no. I believe it…. every word.
Not too long ago, I had a Wall Street consulting firm whose forte was fixing broken bits of multi-billion dollar financial institutions. During one project we were searching for old records relating to a particular business. The archive records were a mess. We opted for the brute force approach. Iron Mountain was the archivist. We ordered up a file of every box sent by our client to Iron Mountain over the past 5 years. We got back a box containing a giant paper file… the two-tone green-striped computer paper… the details of thousands and thousands and thousands of archive boxes stored with Iron Mountain at (if I recall) $1.25 per box per month. There was a group of boxes I still remember….
A coupl’a hundred boxes sent to the archives, and under the field for CONTENTS was the following:
"See Enclosed List”
So some manager delegated a couple of employees to prepare hundreds of archive boxes. What must have been several TONS of documents. Meticulously collated. Lists made of the contents of each box. Must have taken them weeks. Then the lists were put into those boxes and sealed. Never to be seen again. The computer records describing the contents labeled “See enclosed list.”
Why didn’t they just shred them? It would have been faster and cheaper.
If that’s the way things work at a for-profit Wall Street company, hyper-focused on costs, I can only imagine what the government must be like.
Discussion (23)
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These mines have been doing this forever. Lots of what is stored this way is redundant with less secure electronic storage and some of what gets stored this way is electronic media serving as backup against catastrophe. Read a federal facility continuity of operations plan and you will find things along this line. This approach makes it theoretically possible to reconstitute the government, maybe even civilization, following the SMOD.
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If anyone still has computers old enough to read that data.
Aren't the early Hollerith card records of past census data, still being kept somewhere? Nothing can read them.
(I mean EARLY Hollerith cards, not even the 80-column stuff some oldsters may remember. First used in the 1890 census.)
americanhistory.si.edu
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P.S. Underground data storage figures into the last aired episode of the original "Kolchak" series.
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If they have a data source there is almost certainly equipment to access it available in close proximity. There's a story idea here about the apprentice to the engineer dedicated to assure that all of that is maintained in good operating condition. And the occasion on which access becomes urgently necessary. I love the notion that only 10,000 federal employees may retire in a given month because of this being a bottleneck.
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It is also likely to be where you would really find the Ark of the Covenant.
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