Fire damage restoration across Craighead County, Arkansas

Craighead County is bought on this line for one thing, and that thing is fire. There is no water-damage coverage anywhere in the county, not in Jonesboro, not in Lake City, not out on Buffalo Island. If a pipe let go last night, this page cannot send anybody, and the rest of it explains what it can do.

Fire only, and what that leaves you with

Coverage on this site is purchased county by county and damage type by damage type. In Craighead County only the fire side was bought. A house fire in Brookland, a range fire in Bay, a warehouse fire in Jonesboro and smoke through a storefront in Monette all route from these pages. A burst supply line, a sewer backup or a slab leak at those same addresses does not, and no page in this county will pretend otherwise.

If water is the problem here, the useful order is a plumber to stop it, then the claims number on your policy, then a drying contractor you find on your own. You can still call the county line and say so; the dispatcher will tell you plainly that Craighead is not on the water list rather than sending somebody who cannot take the job.

One kind of water does belong on this side. Hose water, the ventilation holes cut in a roof and the door forced on the way in all arrived because of the fire. They are part of a fire loss and they get extracted, dried and repaired as part of a fire job.

1. You callOne number per county. The dispatcher takes the address, the ZIP and a short description of what happened.
2. A local crew calls backAn independent restoration contractor already working that county rings you directly and sets a time.
3. They look, then scope itNothing is priced from a phone call. The crew walks the building, takes readings, and writes a scope you can hand to your adjuster.

Five paid departments and a ring of volunteer districts

The county Office of Emergency Management lists five municipal departments: Jonesboro Fire Department at 3215 East Johnson Avenue, running seven stations; Bay at 220 Elder Street; Caraway at 304 East State Street; Lake City at 1300 Fourth Street; and Monette at 303 Edmonds Street. Around them sit volunteer and rural departments and protection districts covering unincorporated ground, including Bono at 102 Shelly Street, the Brookland Fire Protection District at 501 North Holman, Cash at 4391 Highway 18, and the Philadelphia, Southridge and Valley View districts.

Jonesboro's department has held an ISO Class 1 rating since December 18, 2015. Published ratings for the smaller departments could not be found, so this site does not print one for them. What the map does say is distance. Caraway is 29 road miles from Jonesboro, Monette 26, Lake City 17. A rural fire is usually a longer fire, and a longer fire is a bigger cleanup.

Black Oak, Cash and Egypt

Two of the county's smaller ZIP codes sit west of Jonesboro on the Cache River, and one of them is named for it. Cash, 72421, took its name from a corruption of Cache and held 280 residents in 2020 on AR-18; the county Office of Emergency Management lists a Cash Fire Department at 4391 Highway 18 among the volunteer and rural outfits covering unincorporated ground, and the town's students go to the same Westside Consolidated district that serves Bono. Egypt, 72427, is smaller and quieter: 113 residents on AR-91 about sixteen miles west of Jonesboro, a place that boomed on the Sedgwick Tie and Timber Company's narrow-gauge line and then watched the timber leave. The post office is the only active business left in it, and Egypt appears nowhere on the county's list of fire departments.

What follows from that is not a complaint about anybody's department. It is arithmetic. A volunteer crew has to assemble before it can roll, and an engine starting from another community arrives after one that starts down the street. A structure that burns longer takes heat deeper into framing and plaster and drives smoke further into wall cavities and attic space, which is how a room-and-contents job becomes a rebuild. That is the practical reason a fire at Cash or Egypt tends to produce a wider scope than the same fire inside Jonesboro's seven-station footprint.

Black Oak, 72414, is the third, and it sits at the opposite end of the county: 233 residents about seventeen miles east of Jonesboro on AR-18, one of the Buffalo Island towns along with Caraway and Monette. It began as a timber town on the Jonesboro, Lake City and Eastern Railroad and turned to cotton once the trees were cut. AR-18 through Black Oak is the same road a Jonesboro unit travels toward Monette, twenty-six miles out, and the nearest municipal stations on it are Lake City's at 1300 Fourth Street and Monette's at 303 Edmonds Street. All three of these places also fall outside Jonesboro City Water and Light's territory and inside Craighead Electric Cooperative's, the seven-county rural system that also serves Bay, Bono, Brookland, Caraway, Lake City and Monette. That is who has to pull the power at the pole before anyone works a burned structure out here.

A ridge down the middle, farm ground on both sides

Crowley's Ridge runs through the center of the county, a crescent of wind-deposited loess left standing when the Mississippi and Ohio rivers shifted course. It rises 250 to 500 feet above the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, its soil runs as deep as fifty feet, and Jonesboro and Lake City sit on or near it between roughly 226 and 330 feet. Off the ridge the county is flat alluvial farmland, drained hard since the St. Francis Levee District was created in 1893, with the slow-moving Cache River later cut into two ditches between Bono and Egypt.

For fire, that landscape shows up as acreage. Agricultural land clearing and debris burning are the ignition sources these departments answer season after season. In spring 2026 Craighead and its neighbors went under burn bans, issued in March and reissued in April with a lift after rain in between, while the Arkansas Forestry Division held the region's wildfire risk at moderate.

Storms first, then the lines that come down

On March 28, 2020 an EF3 with 150 mph peak winds tracked 12.55 miles across Jonesboro between 4:58 and 5:14 in the afternoon, and debris off the Gateway Tire and Service Center at 2801 South Caraway Road struck overhead lines and threw visible power flashes. On December 10, 2021 a tornado that reached low-end EF4 elsewhere came through Monette at EF3 strength, destroyed two industrial buildings at the west edge of town, snapped trees and power poles, and tore most of the roof off the Monette Manor nursing home. The April 2, 2025 outbreak damaged homes and other structures in Lake City and Monette. Caraway lost about fifty buildings to a tornado on October 31, 2013, and Bay took a 115 mph EF2 during the 2011 Super Outbreak.

Craighead Electric Cooperative carries the rural load north and east of Jonesboro: more than 4,800 miles of distribution line, 18 substations and roughly 30,000 meters across seven counties, first energized in November 1938. That much conductor on the ground after a storm is why fire calls keep coming for days after the wind quits.

What the county is built from

The Census Bureau put the county at an estimated 51,728 housing units as of July 2025, 60.1 percent owner-occupied, with a median owner-occupied value of $210,400 and median gross rent of $958. The stock divides roughly the way the terrain does, with subdivisions and metro commercial construction around Jonesboro and small-town frame and brick cores out east.

Those cores have burned before. Three separate fires struck Monette in 1912 alone, two in January and a third in December, and the town rebuilt its wood-frame commercial row afterward. Jonesboro still holds older masonry downtown, including the 1899 Edward L. Westbrooke Building at 505 Union Street across from the Craighead County Courthouse. Old brick, old plaster and open attic framing all hold smoke longer than a painted drywall wall does, which is why the same size fire produces very different scopes in different parts of this county.

Smaller places covered here

These are on the coverage list and calls from them route, but they are too small to carry a page that says anything a page about the county does not already say.

Questions and answers

The sooner a dehumidifier is running, the shorter the list of things that have to come out.