Memphis, Shelby County
Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration in Memphis, Tennessee
Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration at a Memphis address, in a county where Memphis Light carries the power.
Call (901) 459-6565 How fire & smoke damage restoration works
- Service
- Fire damage
- Held at
- 38103, 38104, 38105 and 26 more ZIP codes
- County
- Shelby
A single desk takes fire calls for this county, and it is the same desk handling the water and the mold ones.
Downtown stands on the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff, the southernmost of the four that rivermen numbered from the north, and the buildings on it went up as warehouses and stores rather than as apartments. Conversion left party walls, common attic space, old elevator shafts and stair towers connecting units that now have separate front doors. Smoke in a building like that moves vertically through openings nobody on the deed knows about. The bluff also concentrates the oldest and densest fabric in the county into a few blocks, so one fire routinely becomes several buildings' problem.
On 22 July 2003 a windstorm took about 339,000 MLGW customers off supply, more than eighty percent of the system, and it remains the largest outage in the utility's history. Restoration ran for weeks in some areas. Events on that scale produce a second wave of fire calls from generators run too close to a wall, extension cords carrying loads they were never sized for, and candles left burning in rooms where the smoke alarm has no live circuit behind it. That is worth knowing when a fire follows a storm, because the cause question and the coverage question both change.
The service is bought at every code held for this place: 38103, 38104, 38105, 38106 and 25 more ZIP codes. Permits for structural repair at this address are handled by the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Construction Code Enforcement, which is worth confirming before any demolition begins.
What decides this job at this address
- Fire damage purchased at
- 38103, 38104, 38105, 38106, 38107, 38108, 38109, 38111, 38112, 38113, 38114, 38115, 38116, 38117, 38118, 38119, 38120, 38122, 38125, 38126, 38127, 38128, 38131, 38132, 38133, 38134, 38135, 38141 and 38152
- Service disconnect
- Memphis Light, Gas and Water
- Landmarks people give on the phone
- Beale Street, Graceland and Sun Studio
- Home Improvement license
- Required in Shelby County from $3,000 to $24,999
- Nearest named water
- the Mississippi River, the Wolf River, the Loosahatchie River, Nonconnah Creek and McKellar Lake
- Permit issued by
- the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Construction Code Enforcement
Cause and access decide the sequence on these jobs before cleaning does. The panel, the gas meter and the utility disconnect are photographed as found, and MLGW is the single call for all three services inside the city. In a converted downtown building the ventilation cuts and the sprinkler discharge often leave more water than fire damage, so tarping and extraction run the same day. The joint permit office is contacted while the scope is still being written, rather than once the rebuild is priced.
What the building stock here does
Anything standing before 1978 is treated as containing lead paint until a test says otherwise, and in a city with continuous housing from the 1850s that covers most of the interior fabric. Plaster on wood lath, resilient floor tile, the mastic under it and pipe insulation of that era are all asbestos candidates, and they are exactly the materials a fire opens up. Midtown frame houses hold smoke in every key and hairline crack of that plaster. Post-war houses further east hold it instead in blown attic insulation and in ductwork run through unconditioned space.
A dehumidifier is sized to the cubic volume of the contained space, and the calculation goes on the log where the owner can check it.
Fire damage work by type
The kinds of fire damage job are set out once, for the whole of West Tennessee. Memphis is where the local conditions get described, and this page has done that already.
Also at this address
- Water damage in MemphisEvery drop of water in a house here arrives from underground.
- Mold removal in MemphisThe ground under the whole city is loess, wind-blown silt that borings in the Memphis quadrangles put at two to twenty meters thick, under ten percent sand and under ten percent clay, firm enough that a cut into it holds a vertical face.
- Everything covered in MemphisThe town page: what is held here, the utilities, the permit office and what is on the record.
Before you call
Ring while you are standing in the room, not from the office next morning. A dispatcher can talk you through what to check, and half of that check has to happen on site.
If the frame is charred rather than smoke-stained, this becomes an engineer's question before it becomes ours, and we would rather hand it over than work around it.