Memphis, Shelby County
Water Damage Restoration in Memphis, Tennessee
Water Damage Restoration across Memphis and its Shelby County surrounds — the record here still has February 10, 1937 on it.
Call (901) 459-6565 The regional water damage restoration pages
- Service
- Water damage
- Held at
- 38103, 38104, 38105 and 26 more ZIP codes
- County
- Shelby
A call about standing water reaches the desk for this county at any hour, and the hour is not something that changes the routing.
Every drop of water in a house here arrives from underground. MLGW takes no surface water at all, drawing instead from the Memphis Sand aquifer through more than a hundred and ten wells set between three hundred and fifty and eleven hundred feet down and feeding ten pumping stations. That supply is cold, hard and mineral-rich, and it stays at full pressure behind a failed line for as long as the valve is open. It also means the shutoff is a municipal valve on a city main rather than a rural district's, with the meter box at the curb as the last resort when an interior valve will not turn.
Half the city drains to Nonconnah Creek and the other half to the Wolf. Nonconnah has been widened and channelized for most of its length, which moves ordinary rainfall out quickly, but it reverses whenever the Mississippi tops forty feet on the Memphis gauge and pushes water back up into the ground alongside it. Levees and pumping stations built in the 1940s hold that back to a point. The practical result is that a loss in a wet week can have two unrelated causes stacked on each other, a plumbing failure inside and a creek that cannot fall outside.
38103, 38104, 38105, 38106 and 25 more ZIP codes hold it, which is all of them. The permit question at this address ends with the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Construction Code Enforcement, and getting it wrong costs more than asking did.
What decides this job at this address
- Water 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
- Ground drains toward
- the Mississippi River, the Wolf River, the Loosahatchie River, Nonconnah Creek and McKellar Lake
- Shutoff and meter
- Memphis Light, Gas and Water, drawing from the Memphis Sand aquifer
- Class and category decided by
- what the water touched and where it came from, before any equipment is set
- Permit issued by
- the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Construction Code Enforcement
So the first pass separates supply water from outside water before any equipment is set. Supply water gets the valve closed, the affected circuits killed at the panel and extraction started the same visit; creek or backwater water is treated as contaminated, and porous material that sat in it is logged for removal rather than drying. On a converted downtown floor the shutoff may serve four units, so the building manager is found before the wrench comes out. Crews normally bring a meter, a thermal camera and a copy of the riser plan, because in a large building the wet room is rarely the room with the failure.
On the record here
June 25, 2023
Straight-line winds gusting to 75 mph caused nearly 120,000 outages and days of restoration work.
What the building stock here does
Housing here runs from the 1850s to last year and the owner-occupancy rate is 44.9 percent, the lowest anywhere on this site, so who can authorize opening a wall is a live question before anything else happens. Midtown is largely pre-war frame over crawl spaces, where water finds the subfloor and stays under it. The eastern and southeastern annexation belts are post- war slab, where the same gallon travels sideways beneath the finish floor and surfaces two rooms away. The downtown core is nineteenth-century commercial converted to residential, where a failure on an upper floor runs down a masonry shaft and appears at the bottom.
Insulation that has been wet is removed rather than dried, because fiberglass batts hold water against framing and cellulose does not recover at all.
Water damage work by type
One page per kind of water damage work, written for all twenty-one counties. The local half of the answer is the page you are on.
Also at this address
- 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.
- 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
Photographs of the contents matter as much as photographs of the structure. Open the drawers, open the closets, and shoot what is inside them before a single box leaves.
A wet building is a series of measurements rather than a judgment call. Ask for the numbers, keep the log you are given, and hold the invoice up against it when it arrives.