Two businesses affected by a fire at a Lawrence athletic center continued the cleanup Monday while officials of each optimistically opined that they would reopen soon.
"We're hoping this weekend, or sometime next week," said Charles Paden, owner of FiFi's Restaurant, which suffered smoke damage from the March 5 fire that nearly destroyed Total Fitness Athletic Center, 925 Iowa. "We're planning on opening as soon as we can, as long as we can get all this stuff done."
Paden and an electrician Monday were surveying the restaurant, located north of Total Fitness. Draped from ceiling crossbeams and covering the floor inside the restaurant were plastic sheets to protect furniture and carpeting from a sealant spray that workers had applied to the ceiling to prevent any further soot from filtering through, Paden said.
The fire that ravaged Total Fitness, which shared the same structure as FiFi's, never reached the restaurant. Caused by a faulty heater in a sauna, the inferno started in the southwest corner of the health club and was responsible for most of the damage in that area.
But smoke spread throughout the building and into the restaurant, ruining every ceiling tile and most of the unprepared food, Paden said. A nearly full industrial-sized trash container sat outside the restaurant filled with insulation, tiles and food boxes.
"We had to throw out anything that had been opened or had a screw cap on it," Paden said. "It didn't look that bad, but there was soot all over."
A damage estimate hadn't been made, he said.
David Breitenbach, president of Audio Video Services Inc., also hadn't totaled his losses from the fire. Audio Video shares the Total Fitness building and is located on the lower level in the rear of the structure.
"It's really going to be hard to assess that right now," Breitenbach said. "Right now we're just drying out. We've done a good job of saving the vast majority of our electrical equipment, but it's hard to say how much inventory we lost."
He estimated, however, that property loss would be far less than structure damage. Along with smoke damage, Audio Video suffered extreme water damage from efforts to extinguish the blaze.
"The building took a hard hit," Breitenbach said. "We lost a lot of carpeting and a lot of paper records, but thankfully the records have computer backups."
Breitenbach said he planned to reopen the store March 20. He didn't know if all of the cleanup would be complete, but he said he wanted to begin serving customers as soon as possible.
"It'll be pushing it, but I think we can hit that deadline," he said.
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