Company Helps Protect U.S. Founding Documents

By Linda Strowbridge

After 17 years of installing vaults in banks, embassies and drug enforcement facilities across North America, Europe and Asia, Security Vault Works President Tim Abell is about to complete the toughest job of his career.

For the past five weeks, Abell and a six-person crew from his Laurel-based company have been installing three unwieldy and rather secretive vaults at the U.S. Archives building in Washington to house the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.

Installed in 1953, the Archives' previous vaults did not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Abell said. While the vaults contained a mechanism that raised the documents up into public view, people in wheelchairs couldn't see them.  

A crane lifts a vault component to the fitfth floor of the U.S. Archives building in Washington, where Security Vault Works of Laurel is constructing three vaults to house the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

The vaults also had developed a perilous malfunction, he added. The mechanism that lifted the documents had started to rattle, he said, "and the Archives folks were concerned that it was chattering so much ... the ink was going to shake off the documents."

So a year ago, the Archives contracted Diebold (a security manufacturer in Ohio ) and Security Vault Works to design and install new vaults.

"It is the most difficult job that I've ever done," Abell said.

His crew had to winch all the components, which included 10- by-20-foot panels that weighed 16,000 pounds apiece, in through a fifth-floor window.

"Each piece had to be set onto a platform that we designed and built outside the window, then rolled through the window with very little clearance, lowered down to the floor, transported to the other side of the building and put in place," Abell said.

The crew, Abell said, can normally install a bank vault in a day using a crane to lift the parts into place. In the case of the Archives vaults, however, it took Abell's crew a day and a half to place each individual part. The entire installation is expected to take seven weeks.

Abell declined to discuss the special properties worked into the vaults in order to protect the nation's founding documents. "That would all be classified," he said.  But Abell conceded that the vaults were designed with a terrorist attack in mind, and noted that the Archives vaults are much heavier than the average bank vault. The vault doors, for example, weigh 12,000 pounds each while a standard bank vault door weighs 6,000 pounds.

Abell said the Archives job doesn't rank as a large job monetarily for Security Vault Works, which currently employs 120 people and maintains offices in Maryland , Missouri , Texas and North Carolina . But it's definitely one of the most prestigious.

"There's a sign the manufacturer has put out front of the building," Abell said. "It says 'The Declaration of Independence secures our independence. Diebold secures the Declaration of Independence.' "

E-mail Linda Strowbridge at lstrowbridge@patuxent.com.

This article reproduced from The Laurel Leader on January 9, 2003.