Cleanup underway days after Pizza Express blaze

The Pizza Express restaurant that was gutted by an electrical fire Jan. 2 is still scheduled to reopen by the end of the month, the company said.\n"We have had a cleaning crew in, and they have pretty much torn out what we needed to get rid of, and they've cleaned a lot of the stainless steel items we can keep," said Sara Sheikh, communications manager for the company. "At this point we're waiting to get (electricity) back, and we're hoping to keep the closure to four weeks."\nThe restaurant, located on 10th Street at Crosstown Plaza, delivers mostly on-campus orders.\nSheikh said business has not suffered because of the closing.\n"As far as progress on repairs is going, we're pretty much on schedule, but we thought we'd suffer more on the business end," Sheikh said. Several other Bloomington locations have been picking up the slack from the closed restaurant, and calls to the 10th Street location are being rerouted to the closest location through a temporary call center.\nSheikh told the Indiana Daily Student earlier this month the fire was caused by a short in a circuit-breaker box. The fire quickly spread through an office in the back of the building. The office sustained damage from the fire and smoke, as well as water sprayed by sprinklers and firefighters. \nLuckily, the fire did not spread to any of the other stores in the shopping center, but several had to be evacuated and closed because of smoke in the ventilation system, according to the Jan. 5 article.