![]() ![]() If a prospective employer needs to verify whether a soldier was honorably discharged or a military cemetery wants to know whether someone is eligible for burial, they can get those answers from the OMPF.Īt the time, the federal government preserved exactly one copy of the Official Military Personnel File of every veteran. The file contains a record that unlocks home, business, and educational loans health insurance and medical treatment life insurance job training programs and other perks the country has long considered part of the debt it owes its veterans. It often lists any injuries, awards, and disciplinary actions, along with every place they ever served. It includes the date they enlisted, their training history, unit information, rank and job type, and the date they left. It was clear that the losses would be immense, but it would take weeks for the government to grasp the full toll.Īn Official Military Personnel File documents almost every element of a person’s time in the military. But the sixth floor, the one devoured by flames, held Army and Air Force personnel files from the first half of the 20th century. The employees’ quick work saved many records on the five lower floors from extensive water damage. “I thought he had a boring library job, and then all of a sudden he was rushing into a burning building like a superhero,” Stender says, laughing. But at her home in Chicago, Stender has a photo of her dad wearing a hard hat and carrying a box of records out of the building. He never told her much about the actual work at the records center before he died in 2018. Louis, where he stayed for several weeks. Before she woke up on the morning of July 12, her dad had rushed off to the airport to fly to St. Margaret Stender, now a partial owner of the Chicago Sky WNBA team, was a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia, at the time her father, Walter W. One discovered a clever hack: Squirting dish soap onto the rubber escalator handrails allowed them to gently but speedily evacuate wet boxes. Their primary goal was to prevent the boxes of files from drowning in water from the firefighters’ hoses. “We knew this was people’s lives.” As the sun rose and the fire continued to intensify, Trieschmann was one of the few people on Earth who could even begin to grasp the magnitude of what was happening at 9700 Page Avenue.Īs soon as the smoke began to clear, on the morning of July 16, National Archives employees sprinted in to try to save as many records as they could. “I had never seen a house on fire in real life, only in movies,” she says. They sat there for more than six hours, staring in horror as the flames grew exponentially bigger. Instead, she and her three fellow interns walked out to the far edge of the parking lot, plopped down on the curb, and watched. According to an FBI investigation, few of them had any idea anything was wrong that night until they walked into the lobby to go home around 12:30 am and found out that the sixth floor was burning.Īfter Trieschmann asked the guard to call the fire department, she left the building, but she didn’t go home. Most were custodians assigned to mop the floors, scrub the toilets, and empty the trash before employees arrived for work in the morning. It was about as effective as trying to stop a stampede with a traffic cone.Īlong with the interns, a few dozen other people worked the night shift. They were relegated to spraying water onto the roof and through the large windows that lined the building. ![]() At first, firefighters rushed into the building, but soon turned back: The smoke was too thick and the flames too intense to safely work from inside. By 12:20, multiple emergency vehicles were on the scene. Twenty seconds later came another a motorcyclist cruising by the building had seen smoke coming from the roof, and told another security guard. ![]() ![]() The first call came into the emergency services dispatcher at 12:16 and 15 seconds. “The records are on fire,” she shouted at the security guard, then watched as he picked up the phone to dial for help. She began running back down the flights of stairs. ![]()
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