In the event of a disaster such as a flood, could boxes of paper records be freeze-dried? Could cryogenics help in the recovery efforts?
4 Comments
Edward Bonnema, Meyer Tool and Mfg.
August 1, 2008
There are services that vacuum dry paper records that have been water damaged. We built a vacuum chamber for one many years ago. I don’t remember the name… a Google search would come up with a number of hits.
I remember reading many years ago that a government storage facility in the mid-west (St. Louis?) was flooded. They recovered paper documents by freeze-drying them. I think (and this is shaky) what they did was to drop the temperature below freezing and then put the documents in a vacuum chamber and pump on it, keeping the temperature below freezing. The ice sublimed and the documents were recovered.
I remember the flood in Florence (30 or so years ago). If I am not mistaken, these manuscripts were freeze dried to remove all the water. These books were put in vacuum chambers, they were then frozen. The chamber was evacuated to reduce the vapor pressure of water and then they were heated to remove the water. In this environment the water went from a solid to a vapor and was collected on a cold condenser plate as a solid. The result was very dry books.
The answer is yes, they can be freeze dried but there is no guarantee that all of the records would be recoverable for several reasons. Some documents will be recoverable, others may not but in any case the recovered document will not look as it did before it became soaked. First, if the paper is coated as some magazines and periodicals are, (picture a National Geographic) the coating will dissolve and may glue the pages together. Secondly, even when dried there should be no misconceptions about the quality of the dried book or document. If the book swells and becomes “wrinkly” if I may coin a word, they more than likely will remain “wrinkly”. If there is a water soluble glue in the binding, the binding will likely fall apart and may transfer to the pages and glue the whole mess together. The only way to determine this is to try to do a book, a page from a newspaper, or a document that they would expect to be trying to recover.
4 Comments
Edward Bonnema, Meyer Tool and Mfg.
August 1, 2008There are services that vacuum dry paper records that have been water damaged. We built a vacuum chamber for one many years ago. I don’t remember the name… a Google search would come up with a number of hits.
Robert Fagaly
August 1, 2008I remember reading many years ago that a government storage facility in the mid-west (St. Louis?) was flooded. They recovered paper documents by freeze-drying them. I think (and this is shaky) what they did was to drop the temperature below freezing and then put the documents in a vacuum chamber and pump on it, keeping the temperature below freezing. The ice sublimed and the documents were recovered.
John Bonn
August 1, 2008I remember the flood in Florence (30 or so years ago). If I am not mistaken, these manuscripts were freeze dried to remove all the water. These books were put in vacuum chambers, they were then frozen. The chamber was evacuated to reduce the vapor pressure of water and then they were heated to remove the water. In this environment the water went from a solid to a vapor and was collected on a cold condenser plate as a solid. The result was very dry books.
Michael W. Morgan
August 1, 2008The answer is yes, they can be freeze dried but there is no guarantee that all of the records would be recoverable for several reasons. Some documents will be recoverable, others may not but in any case the recovered document will not look as it did before it became soaked. First, if the paper is coated as some magazines and periodicals are, (picture a National Geographic) the coating will dissolve and may glue the pages together. Secondly, even when dried there should be no misconceptions about the quality of the dried book or document. If the book swells and becomes “wrinkly” if I may coin a word, they more than likely will remain “wrinkly”. If there is a water soluble glue in the binding, the binding will likely fall apart and may transfer to the pages and glue the whole mess together. The only way to determine this is to try to do a book, a page from a newspaper, or a document that they would expect to be trying to recover.