From family weddings, to grandparents in their younger years, to holiday celebrations and 70s hairstyles, a South Jersey company is restoring precious memories for people devastated by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey.
Victims of both storms are mailing their waterlogged photos to FotoBridge in West Berlin, New Jersey, one of only a handful of companies in the country that can take physical pictures, scan them and then save them digitally.
Thousands of photos are pouring in to FotoBridge in the wake of both storms.
“We could feel the moisture even through the outside of the box and knew immediately that they needed to be dried,” said Julie Morris, the president of FotoBridge. “They found us on the web by doing a quick search for photo restoration, photo saving.”
One customer was Lilly Warden of Houston’s Willow Meadows neighborhood which was hit hard by Harvey.
“We had 18 to 20 inches of water in our home,” Warden told NBC10.
The water severely damaged her family photos. But thanks to FotoBridge, her memories have been saved.
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“I think I started crying like I’m getting ready to do now,” Warden said. “I just felt so compelled to save them. That’s my kids’ legacy. My grandkids’ legacy.”
FotoBridge has laid out thousands of water-damaged photos on a table, dried them, dusted them and finally scanned them so that they can be placed in a digital photo book and saved at a high quality.
“Everyone is gonna go around the clock and as stuff arrives we’re not gonna let anything sit,” Morris said.
Morris told NBC10 they’ve saved about 90 percent of the 3,000 photos that Warden sent to them.
“What other kind of job does someone get to do this? Its smiles. People only do this because they love their families,” Morris said.
To learn more about FotoBridge, Click Here.