A three-story east Reading building was heavily damaged in a two-alarm that started within the restaurant on the ground floor Sunday afternoon, the city fire marshal.<\/p>\n
The cause of the fire at La Granja Azul, South 19th and Cotton streets, was not being disclosed as the matter remains under investigation, Fire Marshal Jeremy Searfoss said Monday.<\/p>\n
The building is the former longtime home of the Coach Light tavern, he said.<\/p>\n
The restaurant specializing in Peruvian cuisine was open at the time of the fire, which was initially reported shortly before 12:30 p.m. by 911 callers who saw smoke coming from the back of the building, Searfoss said.<\/p>\n
Reading fire crews were assisted by suburban companies, including crews from Mount Penn Fire Company and Exeter Township Volunteer Fire Department.<\/p>\n
Crews arrived to find fire extending from the kitchen of the upper floors. The apartments on the upper floors were vacant.<\/p>\n
Firefighters needed extra personnel to cut open sections of the roof to put out the flames.<\/p>\n
Along with extensive repairs that will be needed, Searfoss said investigators noted several code deficiencies that must be remedied before the restaurant can reopen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A three-story east Reading building was heavily damaged in a two-alarm that started within the restaurant on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,736,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-309992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}