Crittenden County is the one place on this line where both calls route

Crittenden County is the only county on this line set up for both kinds of loss. A caller here can ask about water or about fire and reach a crew either way. The ground explains part of why the water half is busy: the county sits entirely on Mississippi River bottomland, flat enough that nearly every foot of drainage was dug, pumped or diked by somebody.

Ground that drains only because it was made to

Beneath the fields and slabs of this county lies alluvial sediment more than a hundred feet thick. The dominant surface soil is Sharkey clay, the dark heavy clay that farmers call buckshot, laid down by Mississippi River slack water. It grows a good crop and it sheds almost nothing. Water that lands on it sits, spreads sideways and takes its time going down, which is why a yard here can hold an inch of standing rain a full day after the storm has moved into Tennessee.

The county's still water tells the same story. At least forty-one named lakes and reservoirs are mapped inside its lines, and most are former river channels the Mississippi abandoned as it moved: Horseshoe Lake, Wapanocca Lake, Mound City Chute, Marion Lake, Blackfish Lake. Wapanocca sits inside a 5,484-acre national wildlife refuge established in 1961, with roughly 600 acres of open water and 1,800 acres of swampland. A house built near one of those old bends is built on the bed of a river that has only recently left.

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.

What the levees stopped, and what they did not

The St. Francis Levee District was created in 1893 and built the levees and drainage canals that made this county farmable. After the 1927 disaster the system was rebuilt to a heavier standard, and downstream works such as the Marked Tree Siphons, finished in 1939, help keep Mississippi River water from pushing back up into the St. Francis basin. No Mississippi River levee break has happened in Crittenden County since 1927.

That record is worth knowing, because it changes what a modern wet-building call usually is. Backwater shoved up the St. Francis by the swollen Mississippi left hundreds of county families homeless in 1927 and again in 1937. Marion's levees held through both of those and the city still went under in 1964 and in 1987. Edmondson flooded in 1912, 1913 and 1937 and rebuilt each time. In May 2011 the river crested at Memphis at 48.03 feet, the second-highest reading on record against a major flood stage of 46 feet; the mainline levees held, a few riverside homes took water, fields and roads went under, and total county damage came to about $500,000. The pattern is consistent. The big levee holds. The rain that falls behind it still has to go somewhere.

Why this county carries a fire page as well

Four of the five counties on this site are set up for one kind of work only. Crittenden is the exception, and a reader deserves to know that before dialing rather than after. Water and fire both route from here, which matters in a county where a single storm can take a roof off and an electrical fault in the same week can fill a house with soot.

The fire history is its own record. The West Memphis Fire Department began in 1929 as a volunteer outfit and is now a fully paid four-station department of 66 members covering about 28,000 residents across 29 square miles that include two interstates and three railroads. Marion's department keeps a written account of the town's worst blazes: a June 4, 1875 fire that took eight buildings including the courthouse and post office, a November 19, 1896 fire through a wooden business block on the east side of the square, a February 2, 1899 fire described at the time as the most destructive the city had ever seen, and an October 10, 1923 basement fire at the Cline-Vick Drug Store that did $180,000 in damage to the buildings around it. Edmondson rebuilt after fires in 1927, 1952 and 1975. And the single worst fire ever connected to this ground is not on any street: the steamboat Sultana burned and sank on April 27, 1865 with an estimated 1,164 dead, and the river has since moved so far that the wreck lies about 32 feet down under a soybean field near Mound City.

Outdoor burning and the county's standing risk

Field burning is part of the farming year here, and the rules move with conditions. Crittenden County went under a burn ban on September 11, 2025, one of ten Arkansas counties restricting outdoor burning that day, with an exception left in place for agricultural crop-residue burning while the Arkansas Forestry Commission rated wildfire danger from moderate to extreme across parts of the state. By an August 2026 statewide roundup the picture had reversed: Crittenden was under no ban and sat among 33 counties rated low risk, where fuels take longer to catch and fire moves more slowly. Heavy wet clay soil and irrigated cropland are part of why.

Three towns built three different ways

West Memphis holds 24,520 people at the interchange of I-40 and I-55, roughly eleven feet above the level of the Mississippi and considerably more exposed than Memphis on the higher opposite bank. Its building stock leans commercial: warehouses, truck terminals and distribution floors, plus the 22 single-story brick vernacular buildings of the East Broadway commercial district put up between 1930 and 1950. Marion, the county seat, is five and a half miles away and largely residential, having grown from 758 residents in 1940 to 13,752 in 2020 along the interstate corridor. Earle sits 16.2 miles west of Marion on US-64 with 1,831 residents, down from a 1980 peak of 3,517, and its buildings date from a timber and cotton economy that has since contracted.

Countywide there are about 21,545 housing units, 57.4 percent of them owner-occupied, with a median owner-occupied value of $160,200 for 2020 through 2024. The smaller places in between carry their own histories and their own building ages.

Six smaller places, and the ground they sit on

North of West Memphis the I-55 corridor carries two of them. Clarkedale, 72325, is among the oldest settlements in the county and one of its newest municipalities: the railroad came through in 1883, Cleveland B. Clarke opened a store there the following year, and the place did not incorporate until January 12, 2001. It counted 336 residents in 2020. Turrell, 72384, lies further north, about five miles below the Mississippi County line, with 517 people spread across 5.35 square miles rather than gathered into a block. It grew out of 1880s timber work, incorporated November 12, 1926, and held a prisoner-of-war camp from 1944 to 1946. It also sits beside the Wapanocca National Wildlife Refuge, where 1,800 acres of swampland and roughly 600 acres of open water occupy a bend the Mississippi walked away from. The shallow, seasonally high water table that comes with this alluvial plain is not a theoretical matter next to that. Gilmore, 72339, is out on US-63 about two miles south of the Poinsett and Mississippi county line, 176 residents around a depot that dates to 1883.

West of Marion the road is US-64 and the distances open up. Crawfordsville, 72327, sits about halfway along the 16.2 road miles between Marion and Earle, which puts it roughly eight miles from either. It incorporated January 26, 1912, grew around a Missouri Pacific line opened in 1888, held a prisoner-of-war camp of its own between 1944 and 1946, and had 462 residents in 2020. Edmondson, 72332, is the other direction, three miles south of I-40 on Highway 131, incorporated in 1911 and governed by African American town officials since its founding. Its 243 residents live in the small place with the longest loss record in the county: floods in 1912, 1913 and 1937, fires in 1927, 1952 and 1975, and a rebuild after every one of them. Both halves of what this county carries are written into that one town's history.

Proctor, 72376, is unincorporated, sits at the Memphis end of the county roughly eight miles from downtown Memphis, and belongs to that metropolitan area on paper while standing on Arkansas bottomland in fact. Horseshoe Lake, 264 residents on an oxbow the river cut off, and Mound City, unincorporated and counted at 318 in 2009, sit on the same ground between them. What all of these share is distance from a staffed engine and heavy clay under the slab. West Memphis runs four staffed stations across 29 square miles; everything named above is somewhere else in the county, on flat farmed ground that holds a rain instead of shedding it. For a fire that means a building has longer to burn before water reaches it, and a larger cleanup after. For a wet building it means the floor is still wet on the third day.

Utilities a crew asks about on the callback

West Memphis Utilities has run water, sewer and electric service as one city-owned system under a seven-member commission since 1940, with about 80 employees, supplying roughly 20,138 people from groundwater wells disinfected with hypochlorite. Its electric side is transmission-dependent on Entergy Arkansas lines inside MISO. Marion Waterworks pumps four wells in the Wilcox Group Aquifer and buys additional treated water from West Memphis Utility. Outside the municipal footprint, Entergy Arkansas serves Marion and the rural county.

Money and housing condition intersect here in a documented way. In 2026 Entergy Arkansas, Google and ICF began a five-year, $25 million West Memphis Energy Impact Fund pairing critical home repairs with energy-efficiency work for about 200 county households, noting that roughly 42 percent of the county's population is ALICE, meaning asset limited, income constrained and employed. Deferred roof and envelope repairs are often the reason a rainstorm becomes an interior water loss.

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.

Answers to the usual questions

What happens next is a contractor's call, made at the building with a meter in hand.