ATLANTA — While hundreds of families were displaced by Friday night’s fire at The Reserve at LaVista Walk Apartment complex in Atlanta, nearly every business in the area has been affected too.
A car wash on Cheshire Bridge had barely any customers on a sunny Monday afternoon - a time when it would normally be packed, the business owners said.
The shut-down streets kept a lot of customers away.
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Many businesses didn’t have power all weekend and just got power restored late Sunday.
Some had to wait until early Monday morning.
“It’s definitely nerve-racking to get a call Saturday morning and not know if the shop was going to be here or not. But once that initial shock goes away though - you think about all those people who lost their homes,” tattoo shop owner Jasmine Mescal told Channel 2′s Tyisha Fernandes.
The owners of Babylon Café thought they were going to lose their restaurant.
“It looked like it. There was a wind blowing in this direction and it seemed like the smoke was billowing over here. It looked like it was going to damage our property,” owner Kelly Raphael said.
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They didn’t have any fire damage, but all the soot from the smoke clogged up the hoods in their kitchen.
They had to pay a company to clean them out.
The café had 2 big parties over the weekend where they were ready to feed a total of 300 people.
They had to cancel the parties, refund the deposits, and toss out a lot of food.
“We’re calculating it up to about $10,000 so far and probably $60,000 in revenue this weekend. We were counting on these parties,” Raphael said.
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