The fires have prompted Rent-A-Center Inc. to step up plans to implement electronic archival systems, said K.C. Condit, director of technical services at the Plano, Texas-based chain of 3,000 consumer-goods rental stores. The company has been looking to move away from using backup tapes anyway, he said. In the meantime, Condit is talking to his company's Iron Mountain representative about fire suppression in the warehouse Rent-A-Center uses.

John Gervais, currently a program manager for the Canada Revenue Agency in Ottawa, is a former Iron Mountain user who said he found the company's services adequate at that time he used them. His records are now stored with Library and Archives Canada -- Canada's National Archives. But if he were still an Iron Mountain customer, Gervais said he would be making a site visit and reviewing safety precautions with Iron Mountain officials -- and making sure he had backups of records.

Fires such as those that hit Iron Mountain's facilities are not unheard of, said Larry Medina, a Danville, Calif.-based records management professional who serves as chair of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators. According to Medina, who is also a member of the National Fire Protection Agency 232 committee -- which sets standards for the protection of records -- the Brambles Information Management Center in Chicago burned in October 1996. And three suspicious fires occurred in an Iron Mountain facility in South Brunswick, N.J. in March 1997.

Though rare, such fires can be extremely costly, both for users and storage facility providers. Damages from two lawsuits related to a May 1997 fire at a Pennsylvania facility owned by Diversified Records Services Inc. are now up to US$65 million. The claimants in that fire, First Union Corp. and Mobil Oil Corp., were awarded more than $20 million each almost four years ago after losing 156,000 and 68,000 boxes of documents, respectively. But the amount of damages rose after the state Supreme Court earlier this month refused an appeal filed by Grinnell Corp., the sprinkler systems manufacturer involved in the case.