DC Velocity - June 2012

problemsolved

Safely storing goods in an earthquake zone

The Problem: In February 2010, the sixth-largest earthquake ever recorded shook Chile, causing an estimated $15 billion to $30 billion in damage. One of the businesses affected by the quake was the records management and storage company Iron Mountain, which maintains a number of storage facilities at its Lampa campus in the Santiago metro area. The high-density multilevel racks at several of its storage facilities collapsed during the earthquake, taking part of the building structure with them. In the end, Iron Mountain had to demolish seven warehouses and their associated racking systems due to earthquake-related damage.

As it went to rebuild its facilities, Iron Mountain resolved to find a storage system that could better withstand future earthquakes.

storage system, and then both together before construction began.

Because Warehouse 11 was built on land classified as high risk for earthquake damage, the engineers determined they would need to reinforce the storage system. They would also have to take the facility’s capacity projections into account. Most DCs expect to have a certain amount of inventory turnover and therefore, assume the racks’ shelves or bays will be only 50 to 80 percent full at any given time. Iron Mountain, however, is storing boxes of paper archives, and these boxes rarely (if ever) move. For that reason, Iron Mountain designs its facilities with the expectation that they’ll always be at 100-percent capacity.

The reinforcing in this case was custom-tai-lored to fit the Iron Mountain facility. Ordinarily, Interlake Mecalux would seismically engineer racks by using longitudinal bracing across the back of the rack. Using this approach for Iron Mountain, however, would have reduced the amount of storage space available and interfered with the sprinkler system. So instead, Interlake Mecalux created frames with connections between the beams and the reinforced columns. The connections were designed with a certain amount of elasticity to allow the frame to better absorb the seismic waves created by an earthquake. Interlake Mecalux also created thicker, more absorbent floor slabs to ensure that an earthquake would not cause the rack to topple over.

Iron Mountain’s ability to continue operating after the earthquake and swiftly rebuild its damaged facilities proved to be a competitive advantage. After the earthquake, it picked up 100 new clients in Chile, including one of the country’s largest banks, which had previously used its own storage facilities. “Our competition didn’t have the robust racking or sprinkler systems that helped us survive the earthquake,” says Doug Berry, Iron Mountain’s director of construction and facilities. ;

THE PLAYERS CUSTOMER Iron Mountain Primary business: Records management and storage

Headquarters:

Boston

The Solution: Iron Mountain didn’t have to look far for a solution. Amidst all the destruction, there was one facility on the Lampa campus that was not irreparably damaged by the quake. Just five months earlier, Iron Mountain had contracted with storage system specialist Interlake Mecalux to construct both storage racks and the building for its new “Warehouse 11.” When the earthquake struck, the rack installation was half-finished, but it was undamaged by the shock. An outside structural engineering firm inspected the racks and determined that they would have survived the earthquake even if they had been fully built and packed to capacity with cases of documents. Because the Interlake Mecalux racks in Warehouse 11 fared so well, Iron Mountain ended up contracting with the company to help it rebuild two warehouses that were damaged in the quake.

Why did Warehouse 11 and its racks remain standing while structures all around them collapsed? For one thing, both the building and racks were seismically engineered. For another, the setup was extensively vetted, with teams of engineers reviewing plans for the building, the