Water, fire and mold damage restoration in Memphis, Tennessee

Work at Memphis falls under Shelby County, which is where the codes and licensing questions get settled. Incorporated city and the seat of Shelby County, with a 2020 population of 633,104 on 297 square miles.

This is the base city, so nothing here is a drive-time problem in the way the outer counties are. What it is instead is a routing problem: two hundred and ninety-seven square miles, an interstate loop that congests in both directions at predictable hours, and a downtown grid of one-way streets where a converted warehouse block may have no loading access at all. On the bluff, a job on an upper floor can mean a single freight elevator shared with every other tenant in the building. That, rather than the distance, is normally what sets how fast equipment gets upstairs.

Losses cluster in three places for three different reasons. The pre-war Midtown belt concentrates them through age, with original supply lines, original waste and plaster that has been wet before. The converted downtown buildings concentrate them through stacking, since one failure on an upper floor reaches every unit beneath it and the shared systems are old. The low ground along the creek corridors concentrates them because that is where surface water goes when the drainage cannot take it, which in this city depends on what the river is doing as much as on what fell.

One thing worth understanding about the ground: the New Madrid Seismic Zone is close, the USGS puts the chance of a magnitude 6 or greater in the next fifty years at twenty-five to forty percent, and the soft soils under the city amplify shaking well past what the same event would do elsewhere. What is often said about this and is not true is that Memphis enforces earthquake provisions other Tennessee cities do not. It enforces the 2021 International Building Code, whose seismic requirements come from the same national standard used statewide. The hazard here is different; the code is not.

Memphis holds housing from every decade since the 1850s and the owner-occupancy rate is 44.9 percent, the lowest of any place on this site. The result is that no single assumption about foundations, wiring or wall construction survives a drive across the city. Midtown is largely pre-war on crawl spaces; the eastern and southeastern annexation belts are post-war slab; the downtown core is nineteenth-century commercial converted to residential. The first question on any Memphis job is which of those three a building belongs to.