Closing a Jonesboro building up after a fire

Ventilation cuts through the roof deck, a forced front door, windows taken out to clear smoke: a fire department leaves openings on purpose, because that is how a fire is put out safely and how crews get home. Then the engines leave and the building stands open to weather, animals and anybody walking past it.

The openings, and why they are there

Cutting a hole in a roof lets heat and smoke leave at the top so crews can advance underneath and so fire stops banking back down into rooms. Forcing a door is quicker than hunting for a key at two in the morning. None of it is careless and none of it is optional, but by the end of a working fire a house can have a large opening in the roof deck, two exterior doors that no longer latch, and half its windows out.

Overhaul adds more. After knockdown, crews pull ceilings and open wall cavities to find fire that ran into concealed space. That is the right call every time, and it leaves a building with its framing exposed and nothing between the inside and the sky.

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.

Weather is the clock on this work

Jonesboro averages roughly 52 inches of rain a year and only about 3.9 inches of snow, so the threat to an open building here is nearly always rain, and nobody controls the interval before the next storm. Water entering through a fire-opened roof lands on wet, sooted material and carries the damage into rooms the fire never reached.

That secondary damage still belongs to the fire claim, because it followed from the fire, and it is one of the few places where moving quickly saves real money rather than just feeling better. A roof covered on the first afternoon is a repair. The same roof after two days of rain is often a gut.

What can be tarped and what cannot

A tarp needs something to fasten to and a roof structure that will hold a person. After the warehouse fire in the 5600 block of East Nettleton Avenue on November 6, 2025 the roof collapsed shortly after crews arrived and the building was declared a total loss. Nothing gets tarped on a roof in that condition. The work becomes fencing the site, covering whatever is still standing and planning demolition instead.

On a repairable roof the method is plain: sheet the opening, run the tarp well past the damaged area onto sound decking, batten the edges down rather than nailing through the field, and go back after the first hard rain to check it. On walls, plywood screwed to solid backing rather than nailed through trim, with openings sized so the building can still be entered by the people who are supposed to enter it.

Storm openings are a different claim here

The March 28, 2020 EF3 opened roofs along a 12.55-mile path up to 600 yards wide and damaged roughly 300 buildings, destroying steel hangars outright at the municipal airport. Board-up and tarping crews are stretched thin for days after a storm on that scale, which is worth knowing before you assume someone will be there by dark.

Routing has to be clear on this point. A roof opened by wind with rain coming through it is a storm and water claim, and Craighead County's coverage on this site does not extend to it. The stabilization described on this page follows a fire, including the fires that start when storm debris takes lines down.

Security, cost and the record

Property policies generally expect the owner to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage after a loss, and boarding openings and covering a roof is what that duty means in practice. The cost of doing it is normally part of the claim rather than something you carry alone, so keep the invoice separate and legible.

Photograph the building before the boards go on and again afterward. If the structure is unsafe to enter, fencing rather than boarding is sometimes the honest answer, and the officer on scene will usually say so plainly. Board-up is also a security measure: an empty building with open doors on a commercial corridor attracts attention that has nothing to do with the fire.

Common questions

The number at the top of this page is the one that reaches a crew for this county.