Storage vault keeps its contents safe

LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON — It may be made from solid granite, but Perpetual Storage Inc. still won't allow mummies, antique cars, gold or silver — or anything that might burn — inside its vault.

Instead, this one-of-a-kind vault stores mostly business records on computer tapes and microfilm, plus a few special collections such as 60 million-year-old fossil fish and Frederic Remington bronze sculptures.

Other vaults have been fashioned from salt and iron mines in Kansas, Missouri and upstate New York, but this vault was bored into a solid 3 1/2-mile-long piece of granite that forms lower Little Cottonwood Canyon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps its more secretive, larger vaults just a mile away.

Unlike the church, which use its vaults to store genealogical and other historical records, Perpetual Storage agreed to open its vault to The Associated Press for a tour.

"Right after 9/11 we had a great upsurge in business," said James Nowa, the company's vice president of sales, who said some World Trade Center tenants lost all of their business records. "What we are trying to do is let our clients sleep at night."

Business started slowly 36 years ago after two partners — the late businessmen Rich Witmore of Utah and Robert Lynch of California — put up the money to excavate a 35-foot-high tunnel about 275 feet long into the mountain of granite. A mining outfit drilled holes for implosion charges, avoiding explosions that would have fractured the surrounding rock.

The work, which cost $750,000, would take millions of dollars today, Nowa said.

The idea for commercial storage came from the LDS Church, which opened its six tunnel vaults in 1964, four years earlier than Perpetual Storage. The church rarely opens its vaults to outsiders and turned down an AP request to visit.

Privately held Perpetual Storage doesn't disclose revenue, but it recovered the $750,000 investment long ago, Nowa said. It employs about 10 people, including guards and couriers.

The company opened its vault in 1968 when the only things it could attract for storage were mostly art, artifacts and precious metals. That left most of the vault empty, and the business struggled through the 1970s.

It wasn't until computers came into widespread use that companies began looking for places safe from disaster to store backup copies of electronic records. Perpetual Storage is banking on this niche business to secure its future. It also keeps computer records for hospitals, government agencies and universities.

"We figure computers are not going to go away," Nowa said.

For a time the vault held gold and silver bullion for a Swiss bank, but storing precious metals didn't pay enough to overcome the added security risks.