60,000 Wet Volumes Deliberately Frozen

Sometimes even the contents valet need to call upon their contents specialty associates for some expert help.

You may have seen contents frontline workers carefully rinsing thoroughly saturated books, photo albums, and office files, then deliberately freezing them. They were already wet, so why get them wetter? After all, most water damage occurs when the water is in liquid form.

The reason for rinsing is to get any surface contaminants off the paper. The reason for freezing the books, photos or documents is that freezing stops any further degradation and preserves the manuscripts and certificates until a more sophisticated method of drying can be employed.

When slow, dry heat is applied to freeze-dried papers, the moisture evaporates before it can do any damage to the documents. But not every contents company has freeze-drying machines and that is why they may call in other specialists who do.

For example, after Hurricane Katrina, sixty thousand leather-bound volumes of records were treated by one such company and we’ll tell you more about that adventure in an upcoming volume of Contents Solutions. But for now, we are happy to say that not one page of the 60,000 volumes was lost. That is why we keep them and other specialists in our million dollar database!