OVERLAND • The U.S. Military Records Center was packed with more than 35 million files about the nation's former military personnel. Employees received almost 5,800 letters every day and dutifully tried to answer them within 24 hours.
The six-story center, at 9700 Page Boulevard, protected and managed records dating to 1885. In all, 1,500 people worked there, with much of the key work being done in tight rows of filing cabinets inside the vast open floors.
When the building was dedicated in 1956, it was the largest in the St. Louis area and one of the 20 biggest in the world. The footprint of the 1.35 million square-foot building would cover about 28 football fields. Seven acres of glass covered its windows.
Almost two blocks long and a block wide, it housed records of all the service branches and several federal investigative agencies.
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Although many files were in cardboard storage boxes stacked on steel shelves, managers considered their steel-and-concrete building virtually fireproof.
But some time early on July 12, 1973, a night-shift maintenance employee left a cigarette burning on the top floor.
With all that paper and cardboard, the scene turned into a fiery catastrophe. Firefighters from 11 area departments battled it with high ladders. Spectators lined the perimeter fence; children gathered the charred remains of paper fluttering down from the burning building.
Paper certificates, documents, records and awards continually fed the fire.
"It's like a straw fire — the more you poke it, the more oxygen it gets, and the more it burns," one firefighter said.
It took 50 hours of shooting water onto the top floor to finally put out the fire. About 15.5 million files — 80 percent of the storage on the top floor — were destroyed. That was the main repository of records of veterans of World Wars I and II.
A year-long federal investigation determined that the careless smoker wasn't the only one at fault. "The center ... had inadequate fire protection," the federal report said. "A sprinkler system covered only a small part of the building and fire partitions separating storage areas were on only two of the six floors."
The government removed the sixth floor, improved fire precautions and resumed business. Now called the National Personnel Records Center, it is to move next year to a new three-story building under construction in Spanish Lake, near Hazelwood East Middle School.