Thuan Ly stood just inside the door of his Gosh! Pan-Asian Bistro and Sushi Bar on Monday trying to recall what his restaurant looked like before a small lake swollen by hurricane rains devoured the back half of his and several neighboring businesses.
Where there had been an office, bathroom and kitchen, there was now a 35-foot cliff above a much larger muddy lake filled with the remnants of restaurants and retail shops.
“It’s in the lake — the whole thing is in the lake,” said the 27-year-old owner.
Nothing seemed salvageable — not the bar he and his brother had crafted or the $3,000 plasma-screen television. For Ly and other business owners at the Lakeland South Center on South Florida Avenue, one of the innumerable steps to recovery from Hurricane Jeanne is recalling what was in the back 20 feet of their businesses before they suddenly collapsed into a muddy hole Sunday.
At Don Bosko’s Beef O’Brady’s restaurant, it was a new, $20,000 walk-in freezer stocked with a fall weekend’s worth of food. On the other side of Ly’s, in Jayni Hall’s The Blind Factory, there was the bathroom and office.
Ly called it a sinkhole. Steve Sullivan, owner of an Outback Steakhouse, said it was a washout into an old phosphate pit.
But Jeff Holden, the shopping center’s owner, said he was waiting for engineers to explain how a small lake that lay past a thick stand of trees behind the plaza suddenly advanced, swallowed 20 feet of asphalt, sheered the back off four of his tenants’ businesses and closed two dozen more.
“It was from the hurricane,” Holden said, adding that rain from hurricanes Charley and Frances, on top of a normal wet summer, were to blame. The Polk County fire marshal had 11 of the storefronts surrounded by yellow tape, but county inspectors had not yet assessed the site Monday afternoon.
Holden already had arranged for Jannabelle’s Bridal Salon to relocate to another of his properties. He was working with Ly on a downtown location and said he was confident Outback would reopen within two weeks.
As Bosko approached his restaurant Sunday, he first guessed there had been a break-in. He smelled gas, so he dialed 911. Then he saw natural light flooding into his office and noticed that his desk now looked in on Ly’s restaurant next door and the lake in back.
“I would’ve rathered it was a burglary,” he said.
Sunday night, Bosko, 57, picked his way through his darkened Beef O’Brady’s.
He seemed to welcome the distraction of giving a stranger a tour rather than thinking about the $10,000 of inventory he lost or what to do with the 20 kegs of beer he had on hand for a weekend of football.
In addition to owners’ dampened dreams, there are hundreds of anxious employees. Outback Steakhouse’s 110 employees gathered in another Outback restaurant Monday for a pep talk.
Sullivan tried to put on a brave face for his employees.
Since the restaurant is still structurally sound it will depend on whether engineers can keep the hole from advancing, he said.
“We will do everything possible at this time to keep the money coming in,” he said.
Christopher Sherman can be reached at cshermanorlandosentinel.com or 863-422-3395.
