By Joel Marino, Michael Mayo and Tonya Alanez
The Sun-Sentinel

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Numerous people were evacuated on stretchers and several firefighters were taken to a hospital after a raging fire broke out Monday night in a Fort Lauderdale apartment complex housing elderly and disabled residents.

No fatalities were reported, but many of the evacuees were elderly, some were in wheelchairs and all were breathing through respirators as they escaped the fire at the five-story Sunny Ridge Acres at 100 SW 18th Ave. An unknown number of firefighters and 11 residents were taken to Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, said Sgt. Frank Sousa, spokesman for the Police Department. No one had life-threatening injuries.

The fire displaced about 100 residents.

The fire erupted shortly after 8 p.m. and was contained an hour later, Sousa said.

Tom McFadden, a spokesman for the Red Cross, said 80 to 100 people would be placed in a shelter, possibly at a nearby school, and the building would be closed for three days.

Several firefighters, suffering from either heat exhaustion or smoke inhalation, were also taken to Broward General. Many of the firefighters carried residents out of the complex on their shoulders.

One resident, S.T. Cuff, said the fire broke out in his neighbor's fourth-floor apartment as the partially blind neighbor tried to light a cigarette.

Cuff, 65, said the neighbor knocked on his door and asked for help. Cuff said Apartment 404 was engulfed in flames when he got there, but he tried to put it out with a fire extinguisher.

When he saw that it was a hopeless task, he told his neighbor to run, returned to his apartment to help his daughter escape and called 911, Cuff said.

It was surreal for me. I'm watching this fire go up and I thought it was already under control.

— Miki Atkinson Resident

"I saw all these flames," Cuff said. "I tried putting it out as best I could, but then I just thought, 'I have to run out of here.' My daughter has asthma so all I wanted to do was get her out of there, I didn't even have time to get my shoes."

Residents, including one woman in a bathrobe and shower cap, gathered to comfort one another at an adjacent apartment complex as flames shot from the fourth and fifth floors and heavy smoke billowed from the complex.

LaTonya Grayson, who lives across the street, said that as flames shot from the building, she saw an elderly woman waving her arms from a fourth-floor apartment window. The woman walked from window to window, before disappearing from view, Grayson said.

Miki Atkinson, 56, a resident on the fifth floor, said because of several recent false alarms, she questioned the fire alarms when she heard them shortly after 8 p.m. But once she began to smell the smoke, she knew to get out.

She called 911 at 8:10 p.m., she said, and made her way out through smoke-filled stairways.

She left to buy cigarettes nearby and was astonished when she returned to see the heavy flames.

"It was like surreal for me," she said. "I'm watching this fire go up and I thought it was already under control."

By about 9:45 p.m., thin smoke wafted from the building as firefighters walked through and knocked down walls on the fourth floor and fifth floors amid severely charred apartments.

With dozens of fire-rescue vehicles and ambulances lining Broward Boulevard and Southwest 18th Avenue, most of the evacuees stood and sat on a darkened strip of lawn as Red Cross volunteers handed out blankets.