A chef from Bertucci’s restaurant sits outside the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro as firefighters battle a two-alarm fire there Friday. The fire is believed to have started in a wall between Bertucci’s and the Elite Ideas Trading Shop.  Call photo/Ernest A. Brown

By RUSS OLIVO

NORTH ATTLEBORO — Emerald Square Mall was evacuated for over two hours Friday as firefighters snuffed out a smoky two-alarm fire that erupted inside a wall shared by a restaurant and a gift shop on the ground floor of the sprawling retail complex.

North Attleboro Fire Chief Peter Lamb said firefighters responded after a worker reported smoke in Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant about 11:10 a.m. Within a half-hour, he said, firefighters had opened up a wall the restaurant shares with Elite Ideas Trading, and flames started shooting out, prompting the department to sound a second alarm for a working fire.
“It was smoke initially, but as we opened up the wall we did have flames,” said Lamb. “We would call this a significant incident.”
About 1,000 employees and patrons of the 150-store mall were evacuated as firefighters extinguished the fire. Lamb said the fire was under control in about a half-hour, but firefighters remained at the scene to mop up and help the mall vent the smoke from the million-square-foot, three-story shopping center on Route 1. The mall eventually reopened at 1:30 p.m.
But Lamb said it was unclear when Bertucci’s would be allowed to reopen, because health department inspectors would first need to determine whether smoke had contaminated any food products.
The mall has a built-in system that is designed to vent smoke from the complex, according to the fire chief. Lamb said the fire department would throw its own portable ejectors behind the effort to try to speed up the process.
Talking to reporters in the parking lot outside the main entrance to the mall, Lamb said the cause of the fire had not yet been determined, but that it did not appear to have originated in Bertucci’s. He said firefighters managed to prevent the fire from spreading beyond the ground floor of the mall into the upper stories.
“That was something we were concerned about,” he said.
Emerald Square Mall has an established procedure for evacuation in case of emergency, and in this case, it seemed to work well enough, Lamb said. Still, he said, firefighters had to make a second and third sweep through the long, narrow building to make sure everybody was out.
With the mall off-limits, dozens of store employees staked out limited zones of shade in the sun-baked  asphalt parking lot while they waited to be summoned back to work. Patrons emerged from motor vehicles with quizzical expressions as they arrived to a battery of firefighting apparatus, while the police directed traffic and a news helicopter buzzed overhead.
Annmarie O’Leary, a beauty consultant at Macy’s, said she was at her work station when coworkers returning from a break said they smelled smoke. Moments later, she said, the mall fire alarm sounded, quickly followed by the voice of her store manager on a loudspeaker ordering workers to evacuate.
“It was pretty organized and in control,” said O’Leary, of North Providence.
The fire alarm is “very loud,” she said, adding that she recognized its sound from regular fire drills during the two years she has worked at Emerald Square. As far as she knows, there has never been an actual fire during that time, O’Leary said.
 Some stores began calling their employees back to work about two hours after the fire was reported, but the mall remained closed to patrons for a while longer as firefighters continued working. In addition to the North Attleboro Fire Department, crews from Cumberland’s Valley Falls Fire Department and the Salvation Army Emergency Disaster truck were dispatched to the scene.
Craig Stevenson, 20, of Attleboro, was on a shopping trip with his girlfriend when he found himself waylaid by the firefighting effort.
“My girlfriend wanted to do some back-to-school shopping,” Stevenson said. “She’s been saving up for about two months to go shopping on this day and we’ve been waiting out here for about 45 minutes to get in the mall now.”
But Stevenson said he’d wait as long as it took for firefighters to make sure it was safe to go into the mall.
“This isn’t the kind of thing you want to rush,” he said.