“I have nothing to say about it,” says a store owner at a burning Winnipeg mall

Jajit Gill has watched in disbelief as firefighters battled the blaze that engulfed his northwest Winnipeg business since 4:45 a.m. Monday.

“It's very difficult for me, very difficult for me,” he said. “It's hard to deal with it. I don't have anything to say about it.”

Gill's Supermarket is located in a shopping center on Keewatin Street at Kinver Avenue in the Tyndall Park neighborhood, where emergency crews closed Keewatin in both directions between Inkster Boulevard and Church Avenue as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze.

Gill got a call from his alarm company that morning that something had set off an alert at his store in the Keewatin Park Mall. He checked the CCTV cameras, saw smoke and was at the store within 15 minutes.

“It looks like a lot of damage because they're working hard on the roof right now, and then it's … water coming into the store, maybe there's a big hole in the roof right now. Therefore (it) looks beautiful. it's a bad situation inside,” Gill said.

He suspects the business will “be closed for a while.”

Firefighters also routed some hoses and aerial equipment to the KFC restaurant near Gill's in the mall.

Gil's has another store south of town on Pembina Highway, but Keewatin said the store is the busiest.

Keewatin is expected to be closed for much of the morning, City of Winnipeg Traffic Management Center X (formerly Twitter) said in a tweet.

Another fire in the city closed part of a road north of downtown.

Firefighters closed Elgin Avenue between Isabel and Ellen streets. It's unclear what's burning in the mostly residential area around Centennial.

Motorists are urged to find alternate routes and avoid both areas while firefighters work.