Netcong Bunker, New Jersey

For more than a decade, this was the principal network operations center for AT&T. It is located on a hilltop in Netcong, New Jersey, not too far from the company’s later control center and headquarters in Bedminister and Basking Ridge. The Netcong center is in a 86,000 square foot, two level subterranean building, with walls of concrete more than 2 feet thick, and entirely cased in steel. Communications lines once branched out from here all over the land, and through microwave links in the tower. The facility included accommodations and supplies for the 30 people who operated the center to live underground for up to three weeks. Vital Records Incorporated purchased this facility from AT&T in 1995, and calls it the Roxbury Vault. The company has a smaller underground vault in Flagstown, purchased from AT&T in 1980. Though it operates a data center inside too, the company specializes in tape vaulting. Besides paper, microfilm, hard drives, and optical disks, another widespread form of records storage is magnetic computer tape, and some off-site underground storage locations are still referred to as tape-vaults. The company claims this is the largest dedicated off-site tape vaulting facility in the USA, with capacity for more than 15 million tapes.