Passports in Hot, Cold Water
By design and purpose, passports take a lot of beating. They get tossed into luggage haphazardly, manhandled by immigration officers wielding large stamps and sometimes jettisoned into a busy road in Tijuana (sorry, dear passport, I blame the tequila).
Now, we can add to the list of bad treatment the rinse and spin cycle.
In the past few weeks, we have received letters from two readers full of concern after they accidentally washed their beloved document with their dirty laundry. Would their passports have to wither and die on the clothing rack? they asked.
Not likely. Your passport could very well come out of this unfortunate situation smelling like Spring Rain. According to Steve Royster, a State Department spokesman, "A washed passport may continue to be used as long as the integrity of the document is not compromised. If the passport cover is separating, any of the data -- including the photograph -- are obscured, or if pages are torn or missing it is unusable."
Ergo, if your passport has not been compromised by Cheer, then you are good to travel the world. If, however, your face looks like it's been attacked by a giant bottle of bleach, then it's best to send it back and wait patiently for your new passport to arrive. You can spend your free time at home emptying out all of your pant pockets.
So tell us: Anyone else out there who put their passport through the spin cycle?
By Andrea Sachs |
July 11, 2007; 9:52 AM ET
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Posted by: librarylady | July 11, 2007 12:09 PM
I carried around a passport as ID when I went out after turning 21 as I didn't get a driver's license till later. One night after returning home late I threw my jeans in the laundry, forgetting that my passport was in the back pocket.
The passport survived although a few entry/exit stamps that I had from visits to a South Asian country had faded considerably -- in one case, you couldn't even make out that a stamp existed there if you didn't know it had been stamped there. The visa of the same country came completely unglued -- I had to glue it back.
The front cover of my passport completely lost its shine and the cloth covering had a couple loose threads near the binding - it also separated slightly (covering came off the card cover)
This happened in 2003, but I used my passport and washed out visa through 2006 for many trips in Europe and South Asia with no issues whatsoever there or while returning back to the U.S.
Posted by: dan | July 11, 2007 12:10 PM
For librarylady -- You freeze water damaged books if it might be a while until they can be properly dried, in cases like when a number of books are damaged if a library is flooded or fire hoses are used. The freezing just buys time. Some sort of moisture removal procedure is then used.
Posted by: Arlington | July 11, 2007 3:48 PM
My brother left his passport in his jeans and ran it through the wash while living overseas. While the pages were OK, the photograph was ruined. He had to go to the consulate to get a new one. I think it's pretty unlikely a passport would survive a trip through the laundry and still meet the criteria stated above.
Posted by: Arlington | July 11, 2007 10:23 PM
Wow, I just did the same thing last week, the night before leaving for a trip to Puerto Rico. Luckily I did not need it to travel there but I am flying to Europe in two weeks. Mine mainly just has a bunch of creases and loose threads, but the pages and stamps remained intact. I have an appointment at the downtown DC passport office tomorrow to get a new one just in case though.
Posted by: Esingles | July 17, 2007 6:10 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
DH has washed his wallet twice in the last 6 months. Everything laminated came out fine, if not improved. Sturdier paper was salvageable (e.g. money, business cards, a gift certificate, voter registration card), while thinner paper and folded items had to go (e.g. scrap paper with a phone number, receipts). The paper
Since passports are largely sturdy paper and with a couple of laminated pages (at least mine is), I'd think they'd fare pretty well. The trick is to delicately separate the wet pages and interleave them with some kind of drying material, making sure that air can circulate around the objects drying.
In library school, they taught us that you can freeze water-damaged books to save them, but I've never been quite clear on what you do with them after they're frozen...
Good luck!