FORT WORTH, Texas — The hallways of BMS Catastrophe's Fort Worth offices are lined with images from heartbreaking moments in American history.

Photos from the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and various natural disasters hang on the walls next to close-ups of books tattered by floodwaters and stacks of documents singed by smoke.

For companies like BMS in the business of disaster recovery, those detailed shots of destruction are points of pride. They're used to show how badly a book or piece of paper can be damaged and still be recovered if retrieved in time.

"Even after water damage from a flood, a lot of things can be restored," said Teri Hill, a spokeswoman for Fort Worth-based BMS, an affiliate of Blackmon Mooring Steamatic. "More than what people think."

While predictions of a paperless society have been made for decades, the swift business that document-recovery companies pick up after disasters shows that many companies still rely on paper for much of their vital information. When faced with a disaster, clients can be more concerned with salvaging documents than retrieving hard drives, Hill said.

Document recovery is a thriving industry in Fort Worth.

BMS has a document-recovery lab at its headquarters in Fort Worth. And Birmingham, Mich.-based Belfor USA has its document-recovery unit in Fort Worth. BMS has been in business since 1981, Belfor USA's parent since 1989. Both have seen work multiply after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Kirk Lively, general manager of Belfor's Fort Worth office, said he has 100,000 boxes of documents waiting to be restored. About 95 percent of the papers are from Katrina and the rest are from Rita, he said.

People with Belfor and BMS said companies should do more to safeguard their vital documents.

"Basically, what we've found is most corporate entities don't have a plan in place," Hill said.

The biggest mistake companies make: storing valuable records in their basement, Lively said.

"You always have water damage in basements," he said.

In early October, BMS began bringing back documents damaged by Rita from southeast Texas to the company's document-recovery center in Fort Worth. There, a staff of about 100 spends its days fighting familiar enemies: water, mold, soot and mud.

By the time the documents make it to the Fort Worth labs, half the battle has been fought by crews on the front lines. They've done the crucial work of retrieving the documents as soon as possible after Rita hit and have packaged them properly for transport, Hill said.

Disaster victims assessing the damage to their documents can unintentionally do as much harm as the disaster itself.

A seemingly harmless act like removing a soggy book from a shelf and flipping through its pages can accelerate the bleeding of ink and the deterioration of pages, Hill said.

BMS crews carefully handle the documents before moving them to refrigerated rental trucks. Freezing the documents creates a "state of preservation," Hill said, where the moisture, mold and fungus that have found its way into pages and bindings are no longer able to cause damage.

In early October, a BMS employee at its Fort Worth headquarters, wearing a T-shirt and wool gloves, pulled stacks of papers fused into blocks of ice from a truck cooled to 18 degrees.

The papers were moved to heated shelves that were then rolled into large blue crates. The documents stay in those chambers for seven days, while a vacuum pressure pump freeze-dries them, Hill said.

Outside the chambers, arranged on the ground in long rows, were dozens of fabric-bound record books, thousands of pages thick. They had all been freeze-dried, Hill said. Mold had clearly eaten away at the covers, and various pages were covered in blotches.

The volumes were listings of property sales and other records from a county in Louisiana hit by Hurricane Katrina. The books, some more than 50 years old, had been sitting in water for more than two weeks before floodwaters subsided and a BMS crew could retrieve them, Hill said.

Now freeze-dried, the pages were dry. Once the pages were scrubbed with a dry sponge to remove the dead mold and fungus, the books could be scanned to create electronic versions and help ensure their preservation.

After a disaster, companies like BMS Catastrophe and Belfor USA send teams to assess damage and recover documents.

Teams move the damaged papers and books to refrigerated trucks to freeze any moisture and mold in the documents.

The documents are next transferred to freeze-dry chambers, where they sit for seven days. Air is pumped out of the chambers, forcing the ice to turn from ice to vapor, skipping the liquid phase where damage can occur. The process is called sublimation.

If needed, the documents can be wiped of excess dirt with a dry sponge. Pages can be scanned or photocopied if necessary to ensure preservation.

Source: Teri Hill, BMS Catastrophe