Flagpole installation inMemphis, TN

Flagpoles in Memphis

A Mississippi River port and air freight hub, with a large medical district, a warehouse belt around the airport and a downtown strung along the bluff. We cover Memphis and the Shelby County area, including downtown and Beale Street, South Main and the Cotton Row blocks, the Medical District, Mud Island and the riverfront, Overton Square and Cooper-Young, East Memphis and the Poplar Avenue corridor, the University of Memphis and the warehouse belt around the airport.

Wind here. Memphis sits in an inland West Tennessee, seismically active area, which works out to roughly 105 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Shelby County sits over the New Madrid seismic zone, and the code here is written around that rather than around wind: Memphis carries one of the higher seismic design categories in the eastern half of the country, and on ground this soft the design values often come from a study of the site instead of off a map. For a flagpole it lands in the footing and the anchorage, not in the shaft. The soil is loess, a deep wind-blown silt that stands up in a dry hole and slumps the moment it is wet, so a hole here is cut and poured the same day rather than left open overnight. In the local historic districts — Cotton Row, South Main and Central Gardens among them — the Memphis Landmarks Commission issues the certificate of appropriateness, and that comes ahead of the building permit. The warehouse ground out by the airport is the opposite job: wide, level and unsheltered, so those addresses get sized as exposed.

Most of the people who call us from Memphis are distribution and warehouse operators, hospital and research buildings, downtown hotels and restaurants, offices and car dealerships along Poplar, schools, churches, veterans posts and city and county facilities.