Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration
Board-Up & Roof Tarping
Closing the openings is what stops the second loss. The photographs taken while it happens are what settle the argument later.
Call (901) 459-6565 Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration
- Part of
- Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration
- Region
- West Tennessee
- Counties
- 21
- Covered ZIP codes
- 171
A second opinion costs one more phone call, and on a job of any size it usually repays the twenty minutes it takes.
Storms in these counties do not leave buildings closed. The EF-3 that crossed from Tipton County into Haywood on 31 March 2023 ran 39.5 miles at 150 mph and killed one person in Covington; the same evening a separate EF-3 at 155 mph stayed on the ground an hour and 33 minutes across 86 miles through Bethel Springs, Purdy and Adamsville. On the night of 2 to 3 April 2025, an EF-3 at 160 mph took 29 miles through Selmer. Nights like those produce structure fires, downed service drops and roofs opened to weather in the same hour, and the buildings that hold up best afterward are the ones that got covered first.
Fire crews also open buildings on purpose. Vertical ventilation cuts the roof deck, windows come out, and interior walls get pulled to check for extension, so a house that survived the fire in reasonable shape can be wide open when everyone leaves. Power is the other complication: the metro is served by the largest three-service municipal utility in the country, and outside Shelby County the distributors are small, with Bolivar Energy Authority carrying roughly eight customers per mile of line. When 25 June 2023 straight-line winds gusting to 75 mph produced nearly 120,000 outages, temporary closure had to be done without site power, and that is how it is planned for.
What people notice first
- Roof deck cut open for ventilation and left uncovered
- Window and door openings that no longer close or lock
- Rain forecast over a building with exposed framing or attic
- Burned exterior wall sections open to the yard or the alley
- Neighboring suite exposed through a shared wall in a downtown block
How the work runs
Walk the exterior before setting anything
Service drops, gas meters, unstable chimney stacks and roof members that lost bearing are identified from outside. On the older commercial blocks, a burned building next door can be pushing on a shared masonry wall. Nobody goes up on a deck that has been through fire until it has been looked at from below.
Cover the roof
Cut and vented sections are covered with reinforced poly, fastened along battens rather than by weighted edges, and lapped so the water runs off the covering instead of under it. Where the deck cannot carry a crew, the covering is set from the perimeter or a lift. A tarp is a temporary measure and gets a scheduled recheck, not a hopeful one.
Board and secure the openings
Windows and door openings get sheathing cut to the opening and fastened to the framing, not to the trim. Doors that still work are relocked and the keying is recorded. The aim is a building that is closed to weather and to entry, and one that the owner can still get into.
Deal with what is holding water inside
Standing water from suppression is extracted and the wet material is opened up, because a closed building with several hundred gallons in it becomes a mold problem in days. Air movers run where power allows, on generator where it does not. This step is why closure and drying are handled as one visit rather than two.
Document the closure for the file
Openings are photographed before and after, sheet counts and linear footage are recorded, and the covered area is measured. Emergency mitigation is generally handled as its own line in a claim, ahead of the cleaning and rebuild scope. Clear records at this stage keep that conversation short later.
Smoke residue is mapped room by room before cleaning starts, because a building can be heavily affected on one floor and barely touched on another.
What this looks like in West Tennessee
The storms that open buildings reach the thinly settled north end of the region as readily as the metro. On 10 December 2021 an EF-4 at 170 mph crossed Lake and Obion counties, taking in Samburg, part of an outbreak that killed six people across four states, and a separate EF-3 that same night ran from near Newbern through Dresden toward Paris Landing without killing anyone. Both of those counties are among the ten that stepped out of the state's residential permitting program, so nothing about what follows is on file with a local inspector. Emergency covering is one of the few things no paperwork slows down.
Temporary work is planned for a site with no power and no supply house within easy reach. Generators, cordless tools and lighting go on a truck as a matter of course, and so do lumber, sheathing and roll goods, because the nearest yard to a Delta or Tennessee River address may be closed by the time a crew arrives. Weakley County runs three different permit regimes inside one county line, so who inspects the permanent repair is asked at the address rather than assumed. Dispatch confirms the zone, and which of the two area codes a callback comes from.
Board-Up & Roof Tarping by town
Reach here is described in postal codes rather than in miles because miles are the thing a marketing page rounds up and a postal code is not.
The rest of fire & smoke damage restoration
- Smoke & Soot RemovalDry methods first, because the wrong cloth grinds it in permanently.
- Odor Removal After FireThe material still holding the residue, rather than the air around it.
- Contents Pack-Out & CleaningBelongings inventoried, cleaned, stored and returned.
- Kitchen Fire CleanupThe smallest fires in the house and the stickiest residue in it.
- Fire Damage RebuildReconstruction with the county's permit path settled before pricing.
- Soot: The One-Attempt SurfacesAfter a fire, some surfaces forgive a wrong first attempt and some are marked permanently by it.
Questions that come up
Will an insurance policy pay for board-up and tarping?
Emergency measures to prevent further damage are normally treated as a distinct part of the claim, and most policies also place a duty on the owner to take them. That is a matter of the specific policy, so the carrier or adjuster is the one to confirm it. What helps in every case is photographs and measurements taken at the time the work is done.
How long can a tarp stay on a roof?
A well-fastened cover is a matter of weeks, not seasons. Sun and wind work on the material continuously, and a tarp that has been up through a summer here is generally holding less water out than it appears to. It gets rechecked after significant wind and replaced rather than patched.
Can the building be secured if the power is out?
Yes. Closure work is planned to run on generator, since regional outages are a recurring fact here. On 22 July 2003 a windstorm took out roughly 339,000 metro customers, over 80 percent of that system, and rural distributors with long lines per customer take their own time to restore. Drying equipment is sized to the generator rather than assumed onto house power.
The fire was next door and my wall is shared. What happens?
In the nineteenth-century commercial blocks, party walls and common chimney stacks mean the exposure is real even when the flame stayed on the other side. The shared wall is checked for through-penetrations and for stability before either building is opened up further. Work on that wall involves both owners, and the sequence gets settled before demolition starts on either side.
Before you call
Have a rough year of construction. A 1955 house and a 2015 house on the same street fail in entirely different places and are dried by entirely different means.