After the Jonesboro Fire Department drives away

The fire is usually out fast in this city. What stands when the last engine pulls off is a building full of residue, standing hose water, ventilation holes cut through the roof and an electric service that nobody will re-energize until it has been inspected. Restoration starts at that moment, and this page is about that stretch of work.

(870) 744-0364

This is a dispatch line for the county named above, answered whatever the hour.

This county is on the coverage list for fire damage only. A burst pipe or a flooded floor here has nowhere to route on this line, and it is better to read that now than after describing it to a dispatcher.

What an ISO Class 1 rating actually measures

Jonesboro's rating took effect December 18, 2015, replacing the Class 3 the department had carried for about twenty years. At the time only 132 communities in the country held Class 1, and in Arkansas only Searcy and West Memphis stood there with it. The grade is not a single verdict on firefighters: department operations count 50 percent, the water supply system through City Water and Light counts 40 percent, and emergency communications the remaining 10. Then-chief Kevin Miller credited two new fully staffed stations and station relocations that cut response distances. The department now works from seven stations and a training academy on Fire Academy Drive, headquartered at 3215 East Johnson Avenue.

For a building owner the reading is twofold. Insurers use the class when rating property, commercial property especially. And a fire knocked down quickly tends to leave a loss where a smaller share is burned structure and a larger share is smoke, heat and hose water pushed through rooms that never caught. The cleanup is not smaller for it. It is a different job.

You callOne number per county. The dispatcher takes the address, the ZIP and a short description of what happened.
A local crew calls backAn independent restoration contractor already working that county rings you directly and sets a time.
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.

ZIP codes covered here

7240172404

The ZIP is what the dispatcher checks first, so it is worth having ready.

The first day, in order

Nobody scopes work standing inside a building that may not hold. At the East Nettleton Avenue warehouse fire on November 6, 2025 the roof came down shortly after crews arrived and Chief Marty Hamrick called the structure a total loss. At the Nestle plant on March 16, 2022 crews backed out of a production building over collapse concerns and fought it through the night. Structural judgment comes first and it belongs to the fire officer and an engineer, not to a cleaning crew.

Once the building can be entered the sequence is fairly fixed. Get standing water out. Sort power and, in cold weather, heat. Close the openings. Then document everything before a hand touches it: photographs room by room, a written inventory, notes on where residue and moisture are. The adjuster will not have seen the building on day one, and that record ends up being the only version of it that exists.

What makes this place different

Arkansas State University began as the First District Agricultural School in 1910 and was the first of Arkansas's sister district colleges granted university status; its Jonesboro campus anchors the city's northeast side.
Riceland Foods operates what is described as the largest rice mill in the world (established 1930) at 216 N. Gee St. in Jonesboro; its dust collector caught fire on October 7, 2016 (contained within an hour, no injuries) and a machine malfunction sparked another plant fire on May 27, 2025.
Major food-processing plants in Jonesboro include Nestle (Hot Pockets, hit by a serious cooler fire on March 16, 2022 that closed the plant at least a day and forced crews to retreat from a production building over structural collapse concerns) and Frito-Lay (a dryer fire broke out in the rear of the building around 3 a.m. on October 8, 2018, extinguished before crews arrived but spreading smoke through the plant).

Five Jonesboro fires and the damage each one made

Two of the five below are smoke jobs more than fire jobs. That ratio is normal, and it is the reason restoration scopes so often surprise owners who saw only a small burned area.

Documented Jonesboro fires and the pattern each produced
Fire	Date	What it left
Riceland Foods dust collector, 216 N. Gee St.	October 7, 2016	Out inside an hour, damage confined to the unit's main shell, no injuries
Frito-Lay dryer at the rear of the plant	October 8, 2018	Flames out before crews arrived, smoke spread through the plant interior
Nestle frozen-foods cooler	March 16, 2022	Fought overnight, crews withdrew over collapse concerns, plant shut at least a day
Warehouse, 5600 block East Nettleton Ave.	November 6, 2025	Fully engulfed on arrival, roof collapse, total loss, brief spread to grass
Jami Bee Motel, Nettleton Ave.	July 12, 2026	One unit and its attic severely damaged, nine residents displaced

The line this county is bought on

Craighead County carries the fire vertical on this site and no other. Smoke through a house, a plant fire, a scorched kitchen, a total loss on a commercial building: those route. A supply line that split behind a wall, a sewer backup or an appliance hose that failed does not, however much it looks like the same kind of emergency at three in the morning.

Hose water is the exception that catches people out. It came from the fire, it belongs to the fire claim, and extracting and drying it is ordinary fire-restoration work rather than a second claim on a coverage this county does not carry.

The pieces of the job, and the limits of it

A full Jonesboro fire loss usually breaks into the same parts, and this site has a separate page for each: emergency board-up and roof tarping, soot and smoke odor removal, contents cleaning and pack-out, kitchen and grease fire cleanup, electrical fire cleanup, and the repair and rebuild that closes it out. On a small loss you may only need one of them.

Two honest limits belong here. Nothing on this site can say whether the air in a building is safe to breathe or what an exposure did to anyone in it; those are medical questions for a doctor. And some fires do not need a contractor at all. A scorched section of cabinet, a smoke line above a range and a smell gone by Monday is a cleaning job and a can of paint.

Questions and answers

How soon can anything be done after the department clears the scene?

Normally the stabilizing work starts the same day, because an open building keeps getting worse. Cleaning waits for the structure to be judged safe and for power to be sorted, which can take longer than owners expect.

Should I call my insurer or a contractor first?

Insurer first for the claim number, contractor immediately after for board-up and tarping. Policies generally expect an owner to prevent further damage, and that stabilizing cost is normally part of the claim.

Can I go in and get my things?

Only when the fire department says the building is safe, and even then, take documents, medication and irreplaceable items rather than trying to sort belongings in a sooted room. A pack-out handles the rest with an inventory attached.

Is a fire in a plant handled differently from one in a house?

The methods overlap but the scale and the constraints do not. Industrial work brings process equipment, business interruption and often an engineer into the scope, which is why the plant fires listed above ran for days rather than hours.

Nearby towns on this line

If the building is wet or smoke-damaged now, calling beats reading.