PORT ANTONIO, Portland — Piggy’s, the landmark jerk centre in this town on Jamaica’s north-eastern coast where a scene for the new James Bond flick No Time To Die was filmed, was razed just before 11:00 am yesterday.

The origin of the fire is not known, but owner Eustace Lindsay estimated the damage to be in the millions of dollars.

“I was up the road to pick up some chicken when the man I went to get them from got a phone call that the place a burn down,” Lindsay told the Jamaica Observer.

“I drove out, and when I came down all of it under fire. I don’t have anything to say; I don’t know how it started. I lost four freezers, one standing fridge, some fans that take out smoke — the loss is about $6 million for everything. We had 10 workers. Workers were here and we had started to sell already,” he said.

The centre, famous for its jerk chicken, festival and soup, is located at the intersection of Church Lane and Foreshore Road, referred to by locals as “Skill Corner”.

As firefighters brought the blaze under control, district officer of the Port Antonio Fire Service Cordell Orlebar, who was in charge of the operations, explained that his team got to the scene in approximately two minutes.

“When we came on the location we observed that the jerk centre was fully ablaze. We observed light wires from the building on the ground and we started the operation,” he said.

According to Orlebar, the fire department got information on the ground that this was the second fire at the jerk centre. The first, he said, resulted from foam boxes being ignited due to the heat from the kitchen.

“We are not sure what happened this time, but we will do our investigation,” he said. “We have it under full control. There is a tree there also which actually caught fire, and we are getting it out.”

Orlebar appealed to residents to call the fire brigade “not when the fire is blazing but immediately as you see the sparks or suspect that there is a fire, because you can still go ahead and do your mitigation process while the fire brigade is on its way”.

No Time to Die is scheduled for release next year April.