NEW ALBANY, Ind. — Some southern Indiana businesses that just reopened after being closed by the coronavirus pandemic have been forced to close their doors again due to fire damage.
A fire broke out Tuesday night inside a strip mall along State Street in New Albany. While the fire started inside a nail salon, the damage spread to multiple other businesses.
"Really bad timing. We were really excited to get open,” said Beau Kerley, who owns Tucker’s American Favorites
Kerley just opened the restaurant last week after being closed from the coronavirus pandemic.
Kerley’s restaurant is two doors down from the nail salon where the fire started. On Wednesday he said he found the damage to his building was worse than expected.
"When I left last night, I thought we got pretty lucky, there wasn’t a lot of damage. But when the odor today was really strong,” said Kerley. “We have a little bit of ceiling damage where the fire department was having to check to make sure there wasn’t any fire in the ceiling.”
Kerley says the chemicals from the nail salon's products are causing more issues.
“All of our liquor bottles have pour spouts and it could get inside of the bottles and possibly cause some damage or a contaminate there so we're probably going to have to get rid of nearly everything in the building it looks like,” he said.
This comes after Kerley says he spent $30,000 to put new flooring and paint in the restaurant. Now, he said he expects to spend tens of thousands in cleanup and remodeling. The fire also caused a power outage that Kerley says could cost him thousands of dollars’ worth of food.
"It's going to be a pretty costly thing at a time when money's kind of hard to come by,” he said.
Kerley said he expected to get electricity back on Wednesday but was unsure when he would be able to open again safely.
“I’m a responsible owner, we’re going to do what we have to do to make it safe for everybody,” he said. “We're doing the best we can. We’ll take a lot of time to spruce up what we've got to spruce up, make it a better place and work on anything we can do to make ourselves better so when we do open up we're ready to go. That's all we can do."
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