Helping a Local Colorado Springs Hospital to Preserve Flood Damaged Patient Records

There are times when the traditional methods of drying and restoring contents of a commercial building are insufficient or inadequate. While often the contents of your property can get restored with the conventional restoration approaches, paper materials and sensitive documentation often can get too severely damaged by the time these methods have a chance to work.

This occurrence is something that often happens with sensitive client information or medical records, much like the recent flooding in a South Colorado Springs hospital. The basement level of this facility was extensively water damaged; the most unfortunate aspect is that this space was getting used to store the hard copies of patient records and appropriate documentation.

One of the first steps in the restoration of the contents of this area of the hospital was to employ our packout process. This service removes all of the damaged contents of the facility to a nearby building to get specialized treatment to preserve the information contained in these files and folders before they become unsalvageable. In this instance, the packout process removed boxes and boxes of documents and sensitive files via a refrigerated truck to a nearby facility.

The objective here is to freeze-dry these documents and files at the facility using a process known as lyophilization. This process is much more immediate than conventional drying efforts, leaving less opportunity for the papers to bleed their ink or tear apart from oversaturation.

The actual process flash freezes documents inside of a chamber. Then a pressurized vacuum is applied to remove the air from the chamber while a temperature is set to vaporize the frozen water crystals, leaving dry and preserved documents. Once this process has occurred with all of the affected materials, they can get returned to the client when the water damage restoration in the facility completes.

You might never have heard of the process our team uses to preserve sensitive paperwork and files, but it can prove invaluable to places like this hospital in their hour of need. Many of our lyophilization chambers are even mobile, making them even more accessible to places affected by unexpected disasters. Another reason that you can count on the trusted restoration specialists of SERVPRO of South Colorado Springs. Give us a call anytime at (719) 574-2789.