With three different types of smoke damage that can ruin everything you own, you really need to know which kind you are looking at in terms of the clean up process. These are wet, dry, and fuel oil soot and any one of them will cause damage in one way or the other.
If you have a wet smoke, which is a low-heat smoldering type, it will leave a sticky residue and this type will have the potential to warp your books and documents. A dry smoke that can come from a higher temperature and faster burning fire will be more damaging to your older more fragile books, your older photo books, and older wall paper. The last kind or a fuel oil soot usually comes from your furnaces or other heat source and will give off gritty puffs of soot that will act like a piece of gritty abrasive on your paper items.
Any and all smoke follows a general way of movement and the destruction that it can cause. It will follow your ventilation system and even through your plumbing. Smoke usually travels upwards so in a building that had a fire on one of the lower floors, the smoke damage can reach clear to the top floor of the building.
In most of the fires where the smoke damage has traveled to other places in the building, the damage to any paper items can vary in many ways because the closer the item is to the fire, the more the document could be damaged. The damage can also depend on the quality, age, and the condition of the documents. Keeping these items away from the ventilation ducts or pipe work might reduce the possibility of you having smoke damage.
To clean any of your books or documents, you will need to use extreme care as you could cause more damage by simply put your fingerprints into the damaged pages. If you are going to do this, you need to be in a dry or low humid area and use a dry sponge to wipe off the soot from their pages because if there is any moisture in the air, it will collect on the paper and cause more damage to happen.
If you don't feel comfortable in trying to clean these items, then you will want to find a company that specializes in the cleaning of these books and documents. Smoke damage is sometimes said to be worse than the fire.
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