Flooded photos can be saved. Don’t toss precious memories away!

With all the recent floods, an unfortunate multitude of wet photos and photo albums are being unnessarily thrown onto debris piles. What most people don’t know is that you can save many of the photos!

Steps to take

Wet photos should be air dried or frozen as quickly as possible. Because there is so much going on after a home floods, if you don’t have time to air dry photos, wrap the stacks of photos in wax paper and put them in a zip lock bag to freeze. Freezing wet photos may buy you some extra time.

Carefully separate wet photos from each other. Rinse with water and air dry.

The photos will curl. If you put them in books to straighten out, be sure they are completely dry, or else, you will get transfer from the book. I’ve heard using wax paper may be a good shield. Either way, wait until AFTER they are completely dry to straighten.

Saving Precious Memories

At my friend’s house, I found stacks and stacks of wet photos that had been sitting in flood water for over 2 weeks. These are 55-year photos of her parents’ wedding that we saved. They are now both over 80 years old so saving these photos means the world to the whole family. The photos were still wet, which makes it easier to salvage.

Dip in water

Lay out to dry

Remove from plastic inserts

At my friend Phyllis' house, her photos were in albums. As you can see with this photo, it’s covered with a plastic insert and the main part of the picture is salvageable. If your photo is covered in plastic, use an exacto knife or scissors to gently cut away and lift plastic off of the wet photo. Rinse with water and dry.

Re-wetting dried stuck photos

If your wet photos dried stuck together, you will most likely believe they are a total loss and toss them. I haven’t tried this yet, however, I heard that you can take the pile of photos and put them in lukewarm water for at least an hour or more. This may help you save photos that you considered a lost cause.

Final thoughts

• Look into digitizing and saving your precious photos on the cloud. There are professional services that can take this tedious process off your hands. Fortunately, my friends had digitized their decades old home movies just a few weeks before the flood.
• I'm learning so much in this recovery process from Hurricane Harvey and with Irma. I really hope my posts help others. Be sure to share this post with others. You never know whose precious photos you help keep because they knew what to do in a tough time.

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Much luv,

@karencarrens

*** This post was posted using the eSteem mobile app on my Android.