Press/Journalists

Facts and Figures About the New National Personnel Records Center

Building Facts

Address: 1 Archives Drive, St. Louis, MO 63138-1002
Dunn Road near the intersection of Interstate 270 and U.S. 367, next to Hazelwood East Middle and High Schools

Facility Size: 474,500 square feet (276,000 square feet for records storage), covers more than seven acres.

Size of Property: 23.5 acres

Owner/Developer: The Molasky Group of Companies

Tenants: the National Archives and 14 other Federal agencies

Cost: $115 million (construction). 20-year Federal government lease

Record Storage Areas: 15 separate record storage bays

Records Space Capacity: 2.3 million cubic feet of records on 385,000 shelves

Shelf Height: 29 feet high

Construction Facts

  • 217,000 cubic yards of fill
  • 30 miles of wick drains
  • 2,000 tons of rebar
  • 25,000 cubic yards of concrete
  • 354 separate concrete wall tilt-panels weighing from 63-160 tons each
  • 1,500 tons of structural steel
  • 21.5 miles of fire sprinkler piping
  • 12,318 sprinkler heads
  • Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Certified facility

Records Facts

Oldest Military Record:  Dates from 1841

Oldest Civilian Record:  Dates from 1821

Largest Individual Military Record:  Air Force General Henry "Hap" Arnold, 6,044 pages

545 miles:  Distance if all 2.3 million cubic feet of record boxes were placed end-to-end (St. Louis, MO to Dallas, TX)

1,500,000:  Number of records requests received at the National Personnel Records Center annually (5,000 – 6,000 per day)

56,000,000+:  Number of individual military personnel files

100 million:  Estimated total number of military and civil service personnel files

6.2 billion:  Number of pages of documents JUST in the military personnel files

9 billion:  Estimated total number of pages of record material in facility

6.5 million:  Number of military personnel records recovered from the 1973 Fire

18 million:  Estimated number of military personnel records lost in the 1973 Fire

2,300:  Number of 53-foot trailers needed to move all 2.3 million cubic feet of records to 1 Archives Drive

115,000:  Number of record streamliner carts to relocate 2.3 million cubic feet of records

6,000:  Number of cubic feet of records moved each day

383:  Number of 8-hour workdays to fill up 1 Archives Drive at 6,000 CF per day

49:  Number of 53-foot trailer loads of furniture, equipment, and professional gear to move over 600 NARA staff to new facility

5:  Number of days to relocate over 600 NARA staff from Page Avenue Facility to 1 Archives Drive

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