Western Avenue restaurant impacted by explosives scare, evacuation

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Business owners near CMC Recycling are getting back to normalcy after they were evacuated while bomb squad members worked to emptying a box believed to have been filled with dynamite.

Now that the area is safe to return to, one local business owner said the evacuation took a toll on her restaurant

“We lost a lot of money, we lost a lot of food, and it was just unbelievable,” said Big Apple Kitchen owner, Theresa Dadzie.

Like many people in the area, Dadzie was shocked when she was told to evacuate her store.

“But they didn’t say anything, they just said, ‘Everybody needs to go,’ so for my safety, and the safety of my customers, we had to just leave and just go,” she said.

Because she left so abruptly, she said she lost hundreds of dollars’ worth of food she had prepared that day.

“It was time to serve our customers, so the food everything was in the kitchen ready to serve, and it was like, ‘big wow,’ because it was almost 2,000 or somewhere food that got messed up,” she said.

Since she was unable to return, she had to throw everything away, and she says she wasn’t the only business affected by the evacuation.

“Just want to tell my business partners around us here, that we should just keep our courage and keep encouraging our customers, because we didn’t expect this to happen and it happened,” said Dadzie. “It’s not only I, a lot of people got lost too from their businesses. So, we just have to keep our faith and keep our fingers crossed that everything will be okay.”

Now that the area is safe to return to, she says she hopes to get more business soon to make up for the time lost.

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