Twenty-one counties · West Tennessee
Water, fire and mold damage restoration across West Tennessee
Twenty-one counties, three dispatch numbers, answered around the clock.
Call (901) 459-6565 See what is covered
- Counties
- 21
- ZIP codes
- 171
- Communities
- 139
- Dispatch desks
- three, one per zone
Every page on this site carries the number that answers for its own county, in the rail on the left and again in the table at the foot.
This site covers West Tennessee and nothing outside it. That is the western of the state's three Grand Divisions as the legislature fixed them — twenty-one counties holding everything between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi, which is also the ground the Chickasaw ceded in 1818 and that opened to settlement the year after. It is a boundary somebody else drew, which makes it a more honest line than a radius around a city.
Three numbers rather than one, because 901 and 731 are two different area codes and the drive from the bluff at one end of this region to Kentucky Lake at the other is about a hundred and forty miles. Each number is the dispatch desk for its own part of the region, and every page here carries the one that belongs to its county.
Work is bought postal code by postal code and service by service, so coverage is not uniform and this site does not pretend it is. Mold is the clearest case: it is purchased in Haywood, Lauderdale, Shelby and Tipton counties and in none of the other seventeen, and the pages say so rather than letting a caller find out on the phone.
There are no reviews here, no star ratings, no claimed certifications and no street address, because we do not keep one in these counties. What there is instead is checked local material — which river the ground drains to, which utility answers, which of several possible offices issues the permit, and what has actually happened in each of these places.
The three services this site covers
Water and fire are held at every postal code on this site. Mold is held at 51 of them, all in Haywood, Lauderdale, Shelby and Tipton counties, and every page that cannot offer it says so.
The ground this region sits on
West Tennessee is one of the state's three Grand Divisions, fixed in law and used in ordinary speech: twenty-one counties covering everything between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi. The whole of it was the Chickasaw Cession that Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby negotiated in 1818 and that opened to settlement the following year, which is where both halves of this site's name come from — the Chickasaw purchase for the region and the bluffs for its western edge.
This is the flattest part of Tennessee and the ground under it is the most unusual. From the Mississippi bluffs eastward the surface is loess: wind-blown Pleistocene silt, around seventy feet thick at the river and thinning steadily until there is effectively none of it left near the Tennessee River. Loess is under ten percent sand and under ten percent clay, and the US Geological Survey notes that it holds a vertical face in an excavation, which is why the bluffs stand up. Under that sits sand and gravel, and under that the Mississippi Embayment aquifers. Eastward the plain steps down about three hundred feet into the Western Valley of the Tennessee River, and that step — through eastern Henderson and Chester and western Decatur and Hardin — is the real internal boundary of the region.
The EPA puts the ceiling for controlling indoor mold at 60 percent relative humidity and recommends 30 to 50. West Tennessee summers sit above that ceiling outdoors for months at a time, and the region has almost no elevation to escape into: Memphis is around 260 feet, Tiptonville is lower, and the highest ground on this site is Pilot Knob in Benton County at six hundred and fifty-six feet. What that means practically is that the crawl-space humidity problem here is a lowland one rather than a mountain one — it is driven by a high water table and by warm damp air meeting cool ground, not by rain falling on a slope, and it is at its worst in July rather than in March.
Where each number answers
Permitting in West Tennessee is more fragmented than anywhere else in the state and it is the first thing to establish about an address. The State Fire Marshal marks eight counties exempt, which means the state does not issue the residential permit there and codes are a local matter: Shelby, Tipton, Fayette, Madison, Haywood, Dyer, Crockett and Gibson. Exempt is not the same as inspected — Madison, Haywood and Dyer run real county building departments, while in Crockett County we could find no county codes office published at all. Three counties take the state residential building permit in their unincorporated areas: Chester, Hardeman and Lauderdale. And ten have formally opted out of the state residential program altogether: Benton, Carroll, Decatur, Hardin, Henderson, Henry, Lake, McNairy, Obion and Weakley. In an opted-out area nobody inspects a rebuild unless the owner asks for a voluntary state inspection, which has been possible since 2017. The sharpest version is Henry County, where the City of Paris enforces the full 2018 International codes and the county states plainly that no building permit is required and no zoning applies outside the city limits. Decatur County is the other extreme: opted out, with no exempt city and no county codes department at all. Septic and electrical permits come from the state everywhere in Tennessee regardless.
Worth reading before you need it
All four sit together on the guides page, and two of them will tell you, in places, not to call anybody at all.
Where we work
A hundred and thirty-nine communities across twenty-one counties carry coverage on this sheet. Sixty-two of them have a page of their own; the rest are named on their county page, because a page needs something specific to say and a thin one is worse than none.
The Memphis metro — (901) 459-6565
3 counties, 53 covered ZIP codes, 17 towns with a page of their own.
Jackson and the southwest — (731) 600-1238
8 counties, 51 covered ZIP codes, 17 towns with a page of their own.
The Delta and the northwest — (731) 202-8777
10 counties, 67 covered ZIP codes, 28 towns with a page of their own.
Every community and ZIP code on this site, with what is held where
The postal codes on their own, all 171 of them, sorted by dispatch desk
Before you call
Bring the deductible figure into the conversation. There is little point scoping a four thousand dollar loss against a five thousand dollar deductible, and finding that out early suits everybody.
Two counties in this region adopted the home improvement license law and nineteen did not, so crossing a line on the map changes what a contractor is required to hold.