Document Drying After Flood And Water Damage

After moving to Southern California, one thing we thought we'd never have to worry about was document drying after flood and water damage in our home. Well, like many things in life, our move wasn't quite as water-free as we'd expected that it would be. Our first month after moving into a new apartment in Long Beach, we woke up one morning to find the entire back side of our bedroom and office soaked through with water. It seems that during the night, one of the sprinkler heads that waters the plants outside of our back wall had burst, which meant all the water from it was basically pouring straight into our carpet through the wall instead of keeping the plants healthy.

Fortunately, that time nothing was damaged. They ripped up our carpet, replaced it and cleaned it, and we were good to go. Then, about 6 months later, the same thing happened after a few days of unusually heavy rain. Of course, this time we were a little more annoyed about it because they hadn't fixed the problem with the wall that was allowing the water to leak in. Still, our landlords gave us a discount for the month and we were okay with it.

Worse, though, was the fact that this time some important documents that we had been keeping in a cardboard box on the carpet in our office had been soaked completely through, which meant we now had a problem with document drying after flood and water damage. My husband is a librarian, and had taken some classes on disaster recovery, and so he suggested we freeze them until we could get to them. That, he said, would stop mold from growing and would keep the documents from getting any worse than they already were.

After that, we got our landlords to fix our carpet again and spent the next few days sleeping in our living room until our bedroom had dried. Once we'd gotten settled back in, we took the documents out of the freezer in the Ziplock bags we'd stored them in to prevent moisture from getting in. The next step, my librarian husband said, was to slowly hand-dry each document with a hair drier and to keep them straight by hand. This would stop them from getting all wrinkly, which can happen if you're not careful when document drying after flood and water damage. It took us forever, but we finally got all our important documents dried and restored. Most of them you can't even tell they were water damaged any more. But next time, if this happens to us, I think I'm going to risk annoying my husband and suggesting we just get a professional service to do it for us!