Why are some bank vault doors so massive (see pic below of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland vault door).
I get banks want to make it hard for would be criminals from getting in but is that kind of door necessary? I’d think going through the walls would be easier (which is not to say easy).
Surely something less massive would suffice…wouldn’t it? Why must it be so big? (and it is not alone, many such examples are out there)
I used to work for an insurance company that had a vault, with an impressive door. (Not quite that impressive, but still.) I don’t even know what they kept in that vault. But I know that when the company went belly-up and we moved out of most of the building, we learned that all the walls to that vault (other than the front door) were just drywall. The massive door was for show, to discourage people from breaking in, I guess. Or just to give am impression of security.
I watched some video with a home safe expert say that many home safes were mostly for show. A robust looking front door and flimsy everything else. Savvy criminals knew to tear them out of a wall or whatever they were mounted in and go through the back which was not much better than a tin can.
Obviously not all home safes are so weak but buyer beware was the point.
A good home safe seems to be one that’s hidden so it’s not obvious to burglars, and/or bolted down so it can’t be carried off readily for later messing with.
Typical burglars aren’t expert safecrackers like in the movies.*
I suspect that classic, massive bank vaults were built in response to publicized cases of safe blowing, and to project an image of inviolability so that depositors would be reassured their money was safe.
The Asphalt Jungle provides a good example of what can go wrong when you try to blow up a safe.
For actual high-security installations, the other walls will be just as thick as the door. I suspect that the Fed is one of those.
For security theater, the door is the only part most folks see, so that’s the part that needs to look impressive.
Was that vault in Mayberry?
(Around 3 minutes in.)
In the mid-70s, I watched a bank being built. I drove by the construction site every day, and you could see the vault being constructed. It was a cage of thick rebar, close together, and many layers deep. Before they poured the concrete, you could barely see through from one side to the other. No idea what the door looked like, but the vault was massive.
With thousands of vaults built in various places and various times, all possible exceptions no doubt exist.
However, real bank vaults are almost indestructible. Steel-reinforcing concrete is the norm. The doors are built to resist nitroglycerine, acetylene torches, and other devices that worked against older vaults.
Encyclopedia . com has a good article on the history of vaults and their modern construction, way too long to summarize here. Read the section on Design especially.
I think my notion is a vault door half as thick would still be so formidable that no reasonable way to break in exists. If you can’t pick the lock, digging through the door would take much too long to attempt before someone got wise to what was happening. Not to mention the equipment needed. If explosives you’d need a truck load and level the whole building making getting the loot difficult (and noticed by everybody).
But, I am no bank robber. Just looks that way to me.
But a vault is one of the few things in which the customer isn’t likely to complain about it being over-built.
I once toured the Diefenbunker, and on the lowest level, they had a vault built for all of the Bank of Canada’s gold. It was actually a vault built within a vault, that was on the lowest level of a bunker designed to survive a nuclear attack. So, yeah, even when you’re only worrying about radioactive ghouls trying to get your gold, you over-build your vault.
Prior to the FDIC when a bank was robbed, depositors were SOL. I suppose they had some equitable method of spreading out the losses but it was a bad deal. Physical security & safety, the soundness of the bank’s finances and investments, their outstanding loans, people took a jaundiced eye at a bank.
Everyone kept a weather eye on the coming and goings in smaller towns, and the banks themselves often distributed weapons, shotguns generally, to nearby businesses. An impressive vault probably did much to reassure depositors.
Huh? Unless the bank was forced to go out of business by the robbery, I don’t see how the second follows from the first. I suppose if you meant stuff in safe-deposit boxes, but those have additional security features themselves. If you just kept money in an account, if the bank was still in business, they’d still owe it to you.
I cannot speak for @Common_Tater but I think the idea was in the old days your money was literally in the vault and if someone robbed it you lost your money.
The FDIC insures your deposits up to $250,000 (I think). If a bank robber empties a bank vault the FDIC will give you back as much as was lost up to that maximum.
Sure. And they’d say they got robbed. Now what?
With vibration, motion, and noise sensors, it wouldn’t take long for the alarm to sound.
That would be a lot older than just before the FDIC. I assumed he was referring to the time just before the FDIC by invoking it in that way.
So you’re saying a person has an account, and has evidence that the account had money in it, and the bank is still operating, and the bank won’t honor the money in the account? I mean, as much as I agree that there was a point in time (and space - this exact thing is what some Chinese banks are apparently claiming NOW to avoid having to pay back some depositors) the bank could get away with it by simply denying they had “your” money any longer, I’d like to think that it’s not the FDIC that prevents the banks from doing that these days.
Maybe I’m just reading too much into the “prior to the FDIC” wording. Generally people choose words because they are attempting to convey the meaning behind those specific words, but perhaps you just meant “a long time ago” despite mentioning something much more recent than the situation you’re envisioning.
No bank ever just kept the depositors cash in a vault. Not in the modern history of money. They lent it out. Obviously this makes depositors nervous, but that is the price of being paid interest on the deposit.
Banks needed to keep some cash on hand in order to allow withdrawals, but not much. They knew that they would be getting the same notes back again as a deposit from someone else soon enough.
But if one day there wasn’t enough cash on hand the whole thing could, and did, unravel as everyone got very nervous and wanted their money back. That was what made banks fail. A bank robbery probably would cause a run, followed by failure of a small bank that didn’t have a wider company to call on. Not that this problem has gone away. It has just moved to even bigger banks.
So banks really needed to look substantial. Lots of effort to make people feel that their money was secure. Big stone buildings. Impressive safes. The safes doing double duty, both guarding the reserve, but just as importantly, guarding perception.
A few years ago, a shopping precinct near me was redeveloped. There were two banks in the redevelopment. Once the site had been levelled, there were two vaults sitting marooned sticking out of the ground. They took a lot of work to demolish.
I wonder if some of the really huge vaults were there to avoid problems in the face of large scale civil unrest or worse. Some would have been built when the civil war was still a keen memory.
They literally had bank robber insurance. Private, though, not from the government.
Far from being an individual operation, most bank-robbing gangs were highly organized. In 1925, bank robbers stole more money than the U.S. government took in from taxation, roughly $3.8 billion. Being a bank teller in Illinois was a dangerous occupation. And robbery was expensive to borrowers. Bankers, to balance their red ink, charged $6 per thousand as a premium against loss from robberies.
The huge amount of loss was one of the reasons the FBI worked so hard against bank robbers rather than put their fairly meager resources against rumrunners.
As others have noted, though, the FDIC reimbursed depositors after bank runs, a different loss problem. The bank owners were the ones SOL, although the number folding plummeted after depositors no longer needed to make a run on the bank.
People talk today about the wealthy getting bailed out while the masses pay for the losses; this was a major instance of the reverse, a time when American society flipped its fundamental viewpoint. That’s what makes the New Deal so important, despite any flaws.
The entire business model of banks is built on the idea that the money account holders deposit with the bank will be loaned to borrowers. Only a fraction of this money will remain in the vault, because it won’t generate income sitting there. The bank would only hold enough cash to meet expected day-to-day withdrawals. This business model goes back many centuries; it’s much, much older than the FDIC. So no, even in the old days a bank robbery would not mean the depositors are SOL, unless the bank was holding an unusually high percentage of deposits in that vault.