You wouldn't know where to find Kentucky Underground Storage, Inc. (KUSI) unless you were practically there .... and that's just how they like it. The last quarter-mile to the facility is over a gravel road and unmarked with signs until the entrance to the 32-acre cavern. Above the overgrown quarry pit loom 50-foot promontories, As one descends toward the entrance on the hot quarry floor, the cool air (a constant 60º) wafts out from the cave, beckoning exploration.

In business since the late 1970s, KUSI stores information, goods, and materials for hundreds of clients from a panorama of industries and a broad geographic base. Combining cutting-edge information management technology with the natural properties of thick Kentucky limestone, the company is growing in reputation in the fields of secure records storage, disaster recovery, and crisis management.

Interesting shapes often dictate intriguing stories, and these caverns are no exception. Remember the gargantuan storage facility depicted in the Indiana Jones movie? You half expect to encounter such hidden treasure as you make your way through KUSI's labyrinth of chambers, where walls of boxes and maximum-security vaults store the physical artifacts of their customers' histories. Several collections from the UK Library System are stored here, as are important papers from state archives. Computer cartridges, cassettes, and optical discs reside in special high-security vaults, along with other forms of media like microform, x-rays and tape. More than 100 limestone pillars, each measuring 2500 square feet in thickness, form the checkerboard layout of the facility, making for over five miles of corridors.

"The limestone cutters began working this quarry at the turn of the century," company president Gate Warburton relates during a tour. "In the early 1920s, they came underground, working until 1972 to remove 32 acres of rock. Every afternoon they'd blast, then haul out the rock the next morning and blast again. No bulldozers either, at the beginning it was mules and dynamite and shovels."

"My father (W.R. "Bill" Griffin) bought the quarry in the late '70s when it was a mushroom company. He bought the property at auction on the courthouse steps, and didn't tell anyone what he'd done for a few months – people would think he was crazy! At that time of course, the cavern was lined with horse manure, because that's what mushrooms grow in, and strung with 100-watt light bulbs."

Two different mushroom companies operated out of these caves, managed by a native of Pennsylvania, where mushroom farms are legion. However, despite the superior characteristics of Bluegrass horse manure, another direction beckoned.

"My father had considered reselling it," Warburton continues, "but Al Smith, who was a friend of my father's and a fellow London resident, had read an article in Newsweek about underground storage in Kansas, and suggested he use the space for that. So Dad went to Kansas, then engineers from that area came here and helped us design from scratch. We partitioned off 300,000 square feet with curtains and installed a dehumidifier. When he first went to Kansas, we were planning on storing commodities and foodstuffs, which would have meant adding refrigeration, but then we got started with the water business."

Most area residents are familiar with KUSI's sister company, Highbridge Spring Water. The source for that water is way back in the cavern, behind pillar #21. Griffin immediately envisioned the possibility of selling it, and they are now a major supplier of drinking water to business water coolers and thirsty consumers all over the region. The company just recently received endorsement as the Official Drinking Water of the University of Kentucky.

"When the engineers were here, they asked my father what he was going to do with all this water seeping out back here, and he said, 'Oh, we'll just bottle it or something,' Warburton says. "When we were getting the water business going, we neglected the storage company for a tong time. There has been a significant increase in the water business lately, especially for the refillable water cooler containers. We have built several dams, so we can pipe the water to our own reservoirs."

As we make our way back through the maze, pallet racks rise eight levels high and stretch in all directions, a fortress of document storage.

About 1986, a group called ARMA (the Association of Records Managers and Administrators), whose president was head of the Department of Libraries and Archives in Frankfort, called for a tour. When a puzzled Warburton asked why, he explained, "You have the perfect place to store documents." Subsequently, the first paper records showed up in 1987, stored near the center of the facility. That storage option now encompasses about 10 pillars worth of space.

The document cases are barcoded and numbered, so the contents can't be known just by looking at the box, thus protecting client confidentiality. Another portion of this massive inventory system is confined within specially constructed vaults, accessible only by voice-recognition entry systems.

"The walls and ceilings are 10-inch concrete with half-inch rebar inside. Each vault has its own smoke and motion detectors and closed circuit cameras," Warburton explains. "In these vaults, we store computer tapes, microfilm, x-rays, and microfiche. Another drier vault is for microfilm and microfiche. Here are some optical disc cartridges. A lot of customers are going from optical disc to CDROM. However, these 3480 tapes, used on mainframes, are the most common computer media that we have."

"We transmit lists of what's coming and going, including tallying of the frequency of access to certain files," continues Warburton. "We move over 100,000 items in a month, in and out. Some medical records we transport several times a day to the same client. The tapes are the only thing that really moves every day of the week. The couriers run seven days a week, along four routes into town. Mondays and Tuesdays are big days, because everybody backs up their systems over the weekend. We're exploring the possibility now of scanning documents and sending them electronically, in order to avoid having to send the actual items."

KUSI has separated their media storage into archival and accessible categories. Many items have to be kept for legal purposes for a certain length of time and not necessarily accessed.

"We work with Destructall for shredding and destruction of records," Warburton says. "If a customer is well organized and has a good retention schedule, then there is a steady process of destruction that's part of the system. But certain professions either don't have systems in place or don't like to throw anything away.

"Legally, if you have a retention schedule, and you destroy things on a regular basis, then you are not held responsible for records after that point. If someone randomly destroys, then they are responsible for it. Sometimes, you can have as much liability keeping things too long as too short. For instance, a lawsuit calls for a particular document – if you still have it, you have to produce it, whereas you could have destroyed it legally."

No matter how ephemeral and invisible modern-day information becomes, it still comes back to physical materials handling and storage in order to keep track of it. KUSI offers its customers a high level of security engendered by a combination of hi-tech, established procedure, and pure topography.

"In terms of security, we have lots of physical and electronic systems that we keep beefed up, but at the same time we work to maintain tight procedures with our personnel and courier service," says Warburton.

Bonded couriers in unmarked vans transport media to and from the undisclosed location; fences, cameras, and voice-recognition systems limit access to the vaults; and the sheer thickness of the limestone affords maximum protection from disasters, natural or otherwise.

As information storage evolves and occupies such a variety of media, what are the growth areas for a company like Kentucky Underground Storage?

"There are less than 10 underground commercial record storage facilities in the country," responds Warburton. "The Commonwealth of Kentucky says that state agencies must store records on state property except in instances where it's not feasible, but we are the only company with a state contract for state document storage. We already have another underground vault facility in Louisville, under an office building, which stores computer media only."

"One of our new markets is something called 'software escrow,"' Warburton continues. "If a firm has written customized software for you and goes bankrupt, who's going to support your software? This kind of agreement provides for a third party to hold the source code on a disk. If something should happen, the company can come to us and we can release the source code to them so they can hire another programmer to maintain their software."

Whatever path company growth may take, Gale Warburton says she and the firm learn primarily from their customers, networking and listening to what they need. That customer list continues to grow, in part because of the facility's geographically central location that allows for quick access to critical files and records, and in large part due to the service and availability of her well-trained staff.

"Wilmore is a great location for an employee pool," she relates. "People move here from all over the country. They're intelligent, educated, and have a great work ethic."

As the tour reaches completion, several pallets of material from a private estate music collection stood waiting for reckoning. Warburton expected an entire class from UK to arrive soon to evaluate the items, to perform the crucial task of archival judgment and provenance, sorting and storing the important physical artifacts of a past.

Adam Bruns is a staff writer for The Lane Report.

Inset: Planning for the Worst: The Business of Disaster Recovery

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