If a wildfire or flood pushed you out of your home tonight, could you put your hands on the things that matter most in less than 10 minutes? Precious family photos, birth certificates, the deed to your house.

If those things are in your attic or basement, Leah Lewis has bad news for you.

"The deadliest rooms are what we call them," said Lewis, owner of Large Document Solutions and a veteran of document preservation. "Your attic or your basement. Even if nothing were to happen, the temperature, the humidity — you can't control those in those parts of your house."

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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the National Archives came up with a term for what happened to hundreds of thousands of survivors — identity loss.  Medical records, dental records, tax records, birth certificates, Social Security cards, all gone.

(MORE: Tornado hits San Antonio, rips roofs off homes)

A year after the storm, NBC News reported that some evacuees still couldn't get hired because they couldn't prove who they were. Between Katrina and Rita, roughly 20,000 to 25,000 applicants were denied FEMA rebuilding aid because they couldn't produce proof of property ownership. About $165 million in relief went unclaimed.

After the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, 80% of insured survivors reported serious problems with their insurance claims, according to United Policyholders. Fifty-seven percent said their insurer required a line-by-line inventory of every destroyed item — a task that becomes nearly impossible when the receipts and photographs of what you owned went up with the house.

Why the attic and basement fail 

Even without a disaster, seasonal humidity swings start breaking down paper, warping photos and inviting mold.

And the timeline of damage is faster than most people realize. According to the National Archives, mold begins forming on wet paper and photographs in 24 to 48 hours.

So here are the steps Lewis says you should take to secure and preserve your documents before disaster strikes.

Move everything to the main floor

Lewis’ first rule is to move everything out of those deadly rooms.

“Store them on the main floor in water and fire resistant container,” she said, “Something that’s easy to take with you.”

If you still need to figure what you should be taking with you in an emergency evacuation, here are some ways to prioritize and organize your documents:

Sentimental items: Photographs and photo albums, children’s artwork, family letters, journals, recipes.

Practical items: Birth certificates, passports, deeds, blueprints, land surveys, insurance policies, receipts for big items that create a paper trail your insurance company will ask for during rebuilding.

Ready.gov and FEMA recommend the same basic thing — a waterproof and fireproof portable container, stored somewhere separate from the home's most vulnerable areas.

(MORE: How wildfires create their own weather)

Digitize properly

It’s not enough to take a picture on your phone or make a photocopy of important documents. Lewis explains that those images are often distorted, with uneven lightning and low resolution baked in. What you want is archival-quality scanning – a professional scanner that reads a document line by line, so details and colors are accurate when reprinting.

Options are more accessible than you may think:

• Local print shops — many now offer archival-quality scanning
• UPS and FedEx Offices — larger locations have added archival scanners
• Scanning bureaus — professional operations that handle larger batches
• Scanner rental — Lewis’ company offers this option for around $500/month, including the scanner, software and shipping.

You don’t need to digitize everything all at once, prioritize property records first, then personal records, then family photographs.

Store a copy off-site

Lewis says her third rule is to store a copy of all those documents and photos in another location, outside of your home.

Storing them on the cloud is good, but for privacy and data breach concerns you might want to avoid storing them in your personal cloud.

Lewis recommends seeking out private family-archive services. These are third-party services that store your digitized records with redundant off-site copies, at a level of privacy a personal cloud account doesn't offer. Many of them also make records searchable, so your grandmother's letters could become a fully searchable family history.

While none of these steps will guarantee that your documents survive a disaster, they dramatically improve the odds and could shorten how long it takes for you and your family to recover from a fire or flood.