Restoration work in a freight town eleven feet above the river

Two interstates cross here, three railroads run through, and the whole city sits about eleven feet above the surface of the Mississippi. That combination shapes almost every loss in West Memphis. The buildings are bigger than a normal town of 24,520 people would have, the ground is lower than the city across the bridge, and both facts show up in the work.

A city that replaced a town the river took

Before West Memphis there was Hopefield, a riverfront community standing on the same ground, protected by private levees only three or four feet high. The flood of 1912 and 1913 washed it away. The name survives on the map as Hopefield Chute and Hopefield Lake and nowhere else. The city that took its place was incorporated on May 7, 1927 with Zach T. Bragg as first mayor, though the name itself had been chosen back in 1883 by General George Nettleton of the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad.

Incorporation did not settle the water question. The city was inundated in 1927 and again in 1937 while the St. Francis Levee District, created in 1893, was still being built out to a standard that would hold. Bridges arrived alongside the levees: the first Mississippi River crossing opened May 12, 1892, the Harahan rail and road bridge in 1916, and the six-lane Hernando de Soto Bridge carrying I-40 in 1972.

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.

Elevation is the number that matters

The city stands at roughly 213 to 215 feet, which sounds like nothing until you set it against the river, only about eleven feet below. Memphis occupies the higher opposite bank; West Memphis does not have that advantage. The response has been engineering rather than elevation. In 2024 the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the city a $16 million PROTECT grant, drawn from an $830 million climate-resiliency package, to restore hundreds of acres of riverfront wetlands so they can soak up floodwater before it reaches I-40 and I-55.

For a homeowner or a building manager, the practical translation is that water leaving a structure has very little fall to work with. Yard drainage, parking lot drainage and storm sewers all move slowly on flat, tight Delta clay. A crew arriving on a wet building here plans on pumping and hauling rather than opening a door and letting gravity help.

Warehouses, terminals and brick storefronts

Freight has defined the building stock since I-55 opened in the 1950s. Trucking and distribution operations including Schneider National Carriers, FedEx National LTL and Family Dollar Distribution sit alongside Southland Park Gaming and Racing, a greyhound track that has operated since 1956 and became a casino, near the I-40 and I-55 interchange. Those are wide slab floors, tall racking, long unbroken roof spans and dock doors, and none of them behave like a house when they get wet or burn.

Downtown is a different problem entirely. The West Memphis Commercial Historic District along the 700 through 900 blocks of East Broadway, which is US-70, holds 22 mostly single-story brick vernacular commercial buildings put up between 1930 and 1950, some carrying Art Deco detail, listed on the National Register on July 24, 2008. Shared party walls, original plaster and old wood framing behind masonry make both smoke and moisture travel between addresses in ways a freestanding building never does.

Storm history that still sets expectations

At 9:40 p.m. on December 14, 1987 a tornado touched down southwest of the city and tracked northeast through it on a path up to 300 feet wide before crossing into Tennessee two miles later. It killed six people, destroyed 235 homes and 153 apartments across three complexes, leveled 35 businesses and Maddux Elementary School, injured roughly 250, and left 1,500 people homeless, with damage estimated between $22 and $35 million. President Reagan declared Crittenden County a federal disaster area three days later.

Eleven days after the tornado, on December 25, 1987, twelve inches of rain fell on a city full of open roofs. That sequence is the local template: the wind makes the hole and the rain does the interior damage. It is why a storm call in West Memphis is usually handled as a water job with a tarping problem attached.

Utilities, fire cover and getting around

West Memphis Utilities has supplied water since 1940 as one arm of a city-owned water, sewer and electric system run by a seven-member Utility Commission with about 80 employees. It serves roughly 20,138 people from groundwater wells treated with hypochlorite, and its electric division depends on Entergy Arkansas transmission inside MISO. On the fire side, the West Memphis Fire Department started as a volunteer company in 1929 and now runs four stations with 66 members over 29 square miles that include the two interstates and three railroads. All of that sits inside one ZIP, 72301: the interstates, the railroads, the East Broadway blocks and the wells the utility draws from.

Marion is 5.5 miles away by AR-77 and US-64, and Earle is 21.4 miles west on US-64. Both have their own pages here, as do the separate water damage and fire damage sections for this city and the narrower pages beneath them for storm water, sewer backups, fire rebuild work and commercial or warehouse fire loss.

Common questions

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