Saving Photos, Documents, and Electronics After Water or Fire Damage

Many wet or smoke-damaged photos, papers, and electronics can be saved, but the outcome depends heavily on what happens in the first day or two. The short version: do not power on electronics, do not pull apart photos or pages that are stuck together, keep wet paper cool, and freeze what you cannot deal with right away.

Sort by what cannot be replaced

Time is limited after a loss, so spend it on the right things. Birth certificates, vehicle titles, passports, tax returns, and insurance policies are a hassle to lose, but the agencies that issued them can provide new copies. Printed photos with no negatives or digital files, handwritten letters, children's artwork, and a hard drive holding the only copy of your files have no backup anywhere.

Two safety notes before you start:

• If the water came from a sewer backup or outdoor flooding, treat everything it touched as contaminated. Wear gloves, and think carefully about whether an item is worth keeping.
• After a fire, do not go back in until the fire department says the building is safe to enter.

One habit that helps in every case: take a quick phone picture of each irreplaceable photo or page as you find it. If the original gets worse, you still have the image.

Photographs

Wet photos

• Handle prints by the edges. The image layer is soft when wet and scratches easily.
• If photos are stuck together, do not peel them. Soaking the stack in clean, cool water may let them release on their own.
• Rinse dirty prints gently in cool, clean water. Do not rub the image.
• Dry them face up on clean towels or a window screen, or hang them by a corner with a clip. Keep them out of direct sun and away from a hair dryer.
• If a framed photo is stuck to the glass, leave it in place and let it dry glass side down. Trying to lift it usually takes the image off with the glass. A conservator or photo lab may be able to copy it through the glass.

If there are more photos than you can dry in a day, stack them with wax paper between each print, seal them in zip-top bags, and put them in the freezer. Freezing pauses the damage and buys you time.

Smoke-damaged photos

Do not wipe soot off a print. It smears and grinds into the surface. Lay the photos flat in a box, keep them dry, and let someone with the right dry-cleaning sponges and tools handle them.

Documents and books

Mold can begin growing on damp paper within a couple of days, and faster in a humid Nebraska summer. The first decision is whether to air-dry or freeze.

Air-dry when you have a small amount. Lay loose pages flat on clean towels in a cool room with a fan moving air around the room, not blowing straight at the paper. Stand damp books on end with the pages fanned, and slip paper towels between sections of wetter books, changing them often.

Freeze when you have a lot, or when the paper is glossy. Coated pages, such as those in magazines and many yearbooks, can fuse into a solid block as they dry. Place the items in freezer bags, keeping stacks in their original order, and freeze them. Do not unfold or separate soaked bundles first.

Frozen documents can later go through vacuum freeze-drying. In that process the ice turns directly to vapor without passing back through liquid water, so pages dry with less warping, sticking, and ink bleeding than they would on a table.

Smoke-damaged paper that stayed dry mostly has an odor problem and can usually be cleaned and deodorized.

Electronics

After water

1. Do not turn it on to see whether it still works. Power moving through a wet circuit board is what causes most permanent damage.
2. Unplug it. If the outlet or the floor around it is wet, shut off the breaker first.
3. Remove the battery if it comes out easily, and do not put the device on a charger.
4. Tip out standing water and set the device somewhere dry.

Rice does very little. Minerals and contaminants left behind as the water evaporates are what corrode the connections over the following days and weeks.

After a fire

Smoke residue is acidic and can conduct electricity. When it settles on circuit boards it leads to corrosion and overheating, and failures may show up weeks later in a device that seemed fine. This applies to equipment in rooms the flames never reached, since smoke travels through the whole house. Leave televisions, computers, and appliances off until they have been evaluated as part of the fire and smoke damage cleanup.

The data matters more than the device

A laptop or phone that will never run again often has a storage drive that can still be read. Keep the device, tell the recovery service exactly what happened to it, and make sure nobody discards it before the data question is settled.

Document it for your claim

Photograph damaged items before you move or discard them, and keep a simple list. Your adjuster will want to see what was affected, and items thrown out without a record are hard to claim. Our insurance claims page explains how contents fit into the larger claim.

Document drying and electronics restoration are specialized services. At Air Force Restoration we plan for them as part of contents restoration, alongside the water damage restoration work on the house itself.

Before the next emergency

• Scan or photograph irreplaceable photos and papers, and keep copies in cloud storage.
• In a finished basement, store keepsakes in lidded plastic bins on shelves, off the floor.

If the damage has already happened, keep things cool and unplugged, freeze what you cannot get to, and let a specialist take the items that matter most.