Why Recover Documents and Books?

Business sensitive documents are often damaged following fires, floods and similar incidents. These documents are normally essential to business continuity, as a quick response and recovery can help prevent serious financial or operational system failures.

What happens when documents get wet?

Contamination due to dust, water damage, a fire or an explosion all means that important information may be lost, so after an incident where damage has occurred it is essential to focus on minimising deterioration and stabilising the situation.

Deterioration begins as moisture is absorbed into the paper. Swelling, adhesion, distortion, and discolouration can make the item unusable unless correctly treated. Moist or wet paper provides an ideal environment for the growth of bacteria and mould.

Water damaged files can be restored and BELFOR utilises specific technologies for document restoration such as vacuum freeze dryers and thermal vacuum freeze dryers. For smoke and fire damaged paper and documents, we use processes which include soot removal, deodorisation and de-acidification to restore the chemical balance.

Mould, Mildew or Bacteria...

Often the damage looks far worse than it is due to contamination from mould or mildew, as the micro-organisms spreads through the matrix of the cellulose.

Professional restoration requires expert processes and BELFOR use various techniques dependant on the damage selecting the most appropriate method for each specific case.

Initial response…

A swift response is essential to mitigate the effects of any incident where documents are involved. BELFOR adopt the triage assessment when dealing with such incidents. Working together with the relevant personnel at the incident site, the most critical or susceptible documents or books are dealt with first. Freezing water damaged documents within 24 hours significantly reduces any biological activity. The major benefits of freezing are that it:

• Enables the document owners to take an overview as to what actually needs recovering

• Prevents further secondary damage such as mould growth and ink migration

• Enables a slower more controlled process of recovery.

Fire and smoke damaged documents also require a speedy recovery. It is essential to remove smoke particles as soon as possible and therefore prevent permanent staining. This is more important when dealing with valuable books as the acids that are produced during the fire can cause long term damage to paper if not removed. This will not normally become evident until a number of years after the incident.

Various methods of odour removal are available. Usually 90% of odour is removed once the soot has been removed. Methods of odour removal include, vacuum deodorisation, vapour spraying and ozone treatment.

Case Studies: (click on text to open, please allow a few seconds for uploading)

1. 'Document Restoration - Cayman Islands National Archive' 
    

2. 'Residential Fire - At home with a good book'
    

3. 'Library Fire - Vienna University' 
    

4. 'Assets Under Water - Bank Bonds in Belgium'

 

This is the Fourth of our Technical briefings:

Issue #01 covering "Rope Access Solutions" please click the link below:

Technical Briefing #01 - 'Rope Access Solutions'

Issue #02 covering "Heating Oil Contamination Remediation" please click the link below:

Technical Briefing #02 - 'Heating Oil Contamination Remediation'

Issue #03 covering "Soot Removal Film" please click the link below:

Technical Briefing #03 - 'Soot Removal Film' SRF

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