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My name is Lee Spence. I'm a graduate of
Emporia State University, Class of 1978...a few years back.
I am president of Underground Vaults and Storage
I've been here with the Underground Vaults and Storage
Company for 32 years.
Basically what this facility is, it's a three-part company.
We have the Underground Salt Museum, which is a museum
underground 650 feet. We have the Underground Vaults
and Storage Company, which is a secure storage company.
which has been in existence since 1959. And then we have
the actual mining company, which used to be
the Carey Salt Company, or now it is Hutchinson Salt Company.
Last year, we had about 60,000 visitors for the museum side.
Now, the underground storage side we do not allow public tours,
so the Emporia alumni is gonna get a very special tour today,
because this is very unique that we don't normally do this
to the general public because of the security.
[Hoist operator] Do watch your step please...
there is a step down...do watch your step please...
...do watch your step...
Since 1959, we've been a booming, growing
company because people all over the world send things
here for storage. We're an international company,
we store for 23 foreign countries, plus every state
in America stores some documents down here. It could
be a city, state records, a lot of tax records, insurance
records. We do a lot of business with oil and gas, and
our biggest business, of course, is the movie film industry.
It's quite a history story there, and the idea came from
one of our long-past owners, who's deceased now. He was
in World War II, and he was on the group that actually
discovered some of the artifacts that Hitler had stored
in the German salt mines. He brought the idea back to the
Carey Salt Company, they came up with a unique lease,
and we've stored these documents for all this length of time
since 1959.
Okay, this is just one storage room of the New Line Cinema,
which is a spinoff or a subsidiary of Warner Brothers.
That's why you see Warner Brothers boxes on here. This is
basically how we store film on the open shelf.
What we call this is Hollywood Boulevard, right through here.
Every one of these storage bays throughout here, except for
the very last one, is all movie film. We have 15 storage bays
going down through here, and basically they represent
four different film companies--
Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Disney.
And they're just full of film.
Basically we have $2 per box per year is what we charge
for our customers. And there's over 80,000 boxes in this
one storage room. And that's how much revenue this
one storage room generates for us.
It's a lot cheaper than what it is out in LA and California,
because out there real estate is really, really prime and
expensive. And then it doesn't have the securities that
we have here. So they're more than willing to pay
$2 a box a year for storage. Pretty good deal for them.