A restaurant was badly burned and several businesses were left with smoke damage after a fire broke out at a Gwinnett County shopping center Saturday afternoon, officials said.
The fire broke out in a storage area at the Zyka Indian Restaurant off Beaver Ruin Road in Norcross about 1:45 p.m., according to Gwinnett fire department spokesman Lt. Justin Wilson.
The restaurant’s general manager had been inside the business to retrieve supplies for other locations, Wilson said. When he turned on the breakers for the lights, he smelled something “electrical in nature,” officials said.
The general manager called the property manager to investigate the smell. The property manager later noticed smoke and fire toward the building’s ceiling.
The property manager called 911 to report the fire and then tried to put it out with a fire extinguisher, Wilson said. Fire crews arrived shortly after and saw smoke rising from the shopping center.
When crews went into the restaurant, they were met with “heavy smoke, heat and fire conditions,” Wilson said. They also were faced with cardboard boxes filled with sugar cane paper supplies stacked from the floor to the ceiling of the restaurant, he said.
Firefighters worked to put out the blaze and to tamp down any hot spots. The fire impacted a total of five businesses, but resulted in no injuries, Wilson said.
Zyka sustained “extensive” damage to its storage area, and was not operational after the incident, Wilson said. A restaurant to the left of Zyka and three businesses to the right had smoke damage, but the smoke was cleared with “natural ventilation,” he said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
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