LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON, Utah -- The narrow, gated driveway is monitored by security cameras that zoom in on license plates. Armed guards waving metal detector wands greet visitors inside a concrete bunker before swinging open metal gates to a tunnel entrance.
Protected inside a mountain of granite is a commercial vault that stores special collections such as 60 million-year-old fossil fish and Frederic Remington bronze sculptures, but mostly company business records on computer tapes and microfilm.
Other vaults have been fashioned from salt and iron mines in Kansas, Missouri and upstate New York, but Perpetual Storage Inc. was bored into a solid 31/2-mile-long piece of granite that forms both sides of this glacier-sculpted canyon.
Inside the climate-controlled repository, the proprietors insist neither earthquake, fire, flood nor the most James Bond-inspired thief could penetrate its security. The vault is protected and safe from "any force known to man," they say, even a nuclear blast. Geologists are reluctant to endorse all these claims but say it is probably as safe as vaults get.
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The steady popularity of the vault -- still about 30 percent short of full capacity -- was buoyed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks left companies looking for more secure places for backup copies of electronic records.
"Right after 9/11, we had a great upsurge in business," said James Nowa, the company's vice president of sales, who noted that some World Trade Center tenants lost all of their business records.
"What we are trying to do is let our clients sleep at night," he said.
The Mormon church's more secretive vaults, used to store genealogical and other historical records, are just a mile away. Those longer tunnel vaults are encased in the same bedrock granite.
At Perpetual Storage, business started slowly 36 years ago after two partners -- the late businessmen Rich Whitmore of Utah and Robert Lynch of California -- put up the money to excavate a 35-foot-high oval 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.
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The idea for commercial storage came from the Mormon church, which opened its six tunnel vaults in 1964, four years earlier than Perpetual Storage. The church rarely opens its vaults to outsiders.
Privately held Perpetual Storage, which would not disclose its revenue, long ago recovered the $750,000 it cost to create the tunnel, Nowa said. It employs about 10 people, including guards and couriers.
The vault was opened when the only items it could attract for storage were mostly art, artifacts and precious metals. That left most of the vault's 150 feet of 30-foot-wide floor space empty, and the business struggled through the 1970s. Only later did it add second- and third-floor mezzanines inside the vault to hold more records.
It was not until computers came into widespread use that companies began looking for places safer from disaster to store backup copies of electronic records. Perpetual Storage is banking on this niche business to make its future as secure as its vault. It keeps computer records for hospitals, government agencies and universities.
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"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 did not pay enough to overcome the added security risk.
In recent years, the company has turned away a Utah Jazz basketball player who wanted to store an antique car because the vault cannot serve as a garage, a research group that wanted to store cryogenic cells because it was not equipped for storage of human material, and a Utah-based religion, Summum, that wanted to store mummies.
"I thought they were talking about Egyptian mummies," said Nowa, whose curiosity turned to horror when he learned local people would be mummified.
"I thought, what if we had our largest customer here and he saw his neighbor hanging from the wall?" Nowa said.
To eliminate fire risk, the company will not store paper or anything that might burn easily.
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The submarine-shaped vault is divided into sections by shelving for records. The company bills its customers by cubic feet based on the value of the records being kept, allowing for negotiation, Nowa said. Clients buy their own insurance.
Among unusual items in the vault is a California man's 60-piece $2 million collection of fossilized fish encased in slabs of Wyoming oil shale. The pieces include a toothy piranha and an alligator-like gar choking to death on a fish it was trying to eat.
With the owner's permission, the company keeps those fossilized slabs in the office section of the vault for display along with four Remington statues, including a 2-foot bronze mountain man. In a lobby, authentic World War I posters hawk war bonds.
No signs announce the presence of Perpetual Storage or its vault at the far end of a tunnel concealed by a concrete bunker, which has a garage door for deliveries. The entrance pad was leveled against the 45-degree granite slope rising hundreds of feet higher. Here on the canyon's lower ramparts, it is only two miles from the Salt Lake suburb of Sandy.
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"You guys have already passed through infrared, heat and motion detectors, but you probably didn't know it," Nowa said, swinging open a 6-ton nuclear blast-proof door. He said seismic sensors can detect any surreptitious underground drilling.
It's little wonder there never has been a disaster or attempted break-in at Perpetual Storage, which can draw on four sources of power -- including canyon hydropower and a diesel generator -- and multiple phone systems. The granite keeps the vault watertight, and it is a flood-proof 250 feet above the canyon floor.
The mountain interior helps keep the vault temperature at a constant 60 degrees, and the air is recirculated every six hours to filter dust and maintain humidity at about 28 percent.
"They're in about as good a position as you can be for an earthquake," said Gary Christensen, hazards program manager for the Utah Geological Survey. "It probably is about as safe as you can get."
Christensen said the granite rock mass encasing the vault probably would move as a single unit from the jolt of even an immense earthquake that is overdue by prehistoric standards for Utah's populated Wasatch corridor. "As rock masses go, it is one of the stronger ones," he said.
The Perpetual Storage Inc. vault mainly houses company business records on computer tapes, left, and microfilm, right.
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