Memphis, Shelby County
Mold Removal & Remediation in Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis in Shelby County, where the ground drains toward the Mississippi River, the Wolf River, the Loosahatchie River, Nonconnah Creek and McKellar Lake — and the desk that covers this end of the region picks up.
Call (901) 459-6565 The mold removal & remediation method
- Service
- Mold removal
- Held at
- 38103, 38104, 38105 and 26 more ZIP codes
- County
- Shelby
Containment goes up before anything is disturbed, which is the difference between a remediation and a redistribution.
The 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. Soil like that drains well and is moderately permeable, so it does not shove water sideways into a structure the way clay does. What it does instead is stay cool a foot down through a hot summer, which makes a crawl space cut into it the coldest surface in the building. Warm outdoor air reaching that surface gives up its moisture on the joists.
Flood stage on the Memphis gauge is thirty-four feet and major flood is forty-six. The river crested at 48.70 feet on 10 February 1937 and again at 48.03 feet on 10 May 2011, within eight inches of the record, and in 2011 backwater pushed the Wolf above flood stage inside the city. Ground saturated to that depth does not dry on the schedule the water level does. Crawl spaces along the low ground stayed wet into the following summer, and the calls that came out of them arrived months after anyone had stopped thinking about the river.
Coverage runs across all of them — 38103, 38104, 38105, 38106 and 25 more ZIP codes — with no gaps left in between. Repair work at this address falls to the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Construction Code Enforcement, and the answer can differ a few miles down the road.
What decides this job at this address
- Mold removal 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
- Water and sewer
- Memphis Light, Gas and Water, drawing from the Memphis Sand aquifer
- Humidity ceiling the EPA sets
- 60 percent indoor relative humidity
- 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
Because of that, the first hour of one of these calls goes to finding the water rather than the growth. Vents, grade, gutters, the ground cover and the condensate line are checked before anything is opened, and a hygrometer left in the space overnight is often more useful than a sample. Where the source is outdoor air rather than a leak, the correction is mechanical: closing and lining the crawl, running an exhaust fan through the roof instead of into the attic, adding dehumidification. If what is there is a small patch on a hard surface and the water has stopped, we say so and leave it with the owner.
What the building stock here does
Under this vertical the city's three building eras behave differently again. Pre-war Midtown houses over crawl spaces show it first on the underside of the subfloor and along the bottom couple of inches of wallboard. Converted downtown floors trap it in furred-out walls where a stud bay sits directly against cold exterior brick with no drainage plane behind it, and at the base of masonry that was never meant to be sealed and then was. Slab houses out east show it at the perimeter, where carpet and pad against an exterior wall run cooler than the room and hold what the air gives up.
Sewage losses are handled as category three from the first minute, and porous material that touched the water is removed instead of cleaned and dried.
Mold removal work by type
These are the branches of mold removal work, documented regionally. The local half of the story is above, under the heading for Memphis.
Also at this address
- Water damage in MemphisEvery drop of water in a house here arrives from underground.
- Fire damage in MemphisDowntown 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.
- Everything covered in MemphisThe town page: what is held here, the utilities, the permit office and what is on the record.
Before you call
Ask for the license number and the exact legal name of the company doing the work, then check it yourself. A subcontractor arrangement is fine so long as it is disclosed.
This page describes what gets removed and why the water has to be corrected first. It does not describe anything else, and no page on this site is written to frighten you.