Firefighters battled a six-alarm inferno early Wednesday in Emeryville that tore through an unfinished five-story housing and retail complex and sent dozens fleeing as it spread to at least five nearby homes, an auto shop and cars along San Pablo Avenue, officials said.

The fire started about 2:45 a.m. at the Intersection, a 105-unit apartment complex being built on the 3800 block of San Pablo Avenue near MacArthur Boulevard at the Oakland border, firefighters said. No one was injured, and the cause was under investigation.

“It was a monster,” said 23-year-old Taylor Grant, who fled her home on the top floor of a duplex six units from where the fire started. “The flames were roaring and smoke was everywhere. The whole block was lit up. I could feel the heat from my window.”

Grant, her sister and their mother, 48-year-old Marlo Ingram, first heard sirens around 3 a.m. and looked out their window at the fire’s growing orange glow.

“We walked outside and embers flew by us across the sky,” Ingram said. “Neighbors were standing there in disbelief. I thought, ‘This is just insane.’”

The flames swelled as families in the neighborhood scrambled to safety and dispatchers sent some 100 firefighters from half a dozen East Bay fire departments. The fire jumped to at least five townhomes behind the construction site, officials said, and sent up debris that landed on roofs and in backyards miles away. Windows of nearby apartments were shattered by the fire’s intense heat.

Heat spreads blaze

“The main body of fire produced so much heat it ignited some of the townhomes,” said Deputy Chief Jim Call of the Alameda County Fire Department.

The East Bay Municipal Water District increased water pressure to the area to help firefighting operations. Smoke could be seen billowing from the burned-out construction site after the most intense flames had been knocked down about 6 a.m.

The fire was declared under control about 7 a.m., said Aisha Knowles, a spokeswoman for the Alameda County Fire Department. A construction crane at the scene, she said, was damaged by the fire and was at risk of falling over.

The fire ravaged James Auto Repair next to the construction site, along with about 20 cars in the garage’s parking lot.

“Pretty much everything is destroyed,” shop owner James Lau said at the scene, where he rushed after getting a call from his daughter about 6 a.m. “I’m glad no one was hurt. These other things are fixable. It just costs money.”

Scene of ruin

Still unable to enter his business, Lau looked through the shop’s open gate at the twisted and melted metal chunks that once were wrenches, lifts, car parts and walls of shelves.

“You never think something like this is going to happen so close by,” said Austin Davis, who owns a gym directly across San Pablo Avenue from the fire and showed up at 4:30 a.m. as crews fought the intense blaze. “It was packed with firefighters.”

Alameda County firefighters used a drone to get an aerial view of the damage while crews doused smoldering fires in the townhomes.

About 50 people in nearby homes evacuated safely, officials said. The Red Cross was assisting displaced residents, and a temporary shelter was set up at the Emeryville Senior Center at 4321 Salem St.

“We are all kind of scattered about the neighborhood this morning wondering what to do and where to go,” Grant said. “We had to all work together to get our neighbors out. One woman on the street is 93 years old. You could hear wood cracking, metal breaking, car parts exploding. It was scary.”

“We don’t know where we will go,” Ingram said. “You wake up at 3 a.m. and drag yourself out of bed with these things that can’t be replaced. But now we are trying to figure out what’s next.”

Falling debris

Streets were blocked off around the usually busy East Bay Bridge Shopping Center. The construction site is across the street from the Pak N Save and Nordstrom Rack stores on the east end of the shopping area.

Large chunks of charred debris from the fire landed in neighborhoods up to 2 miles away around Emeryville, Oakland and Berkeley, residents reported.

The Intersection was approved by the Emeryville Planning Commission in August 2013 and was to include 105 residential apartments and 25,000 square feet of commercial space. Permits for groundbreaking on the site were issued in June 2015, and construction began soon afterward.

The site’s developer, Holliday Development, promoted the building’s easy access to transportation, electric car charging stations, and other environmentally friendly features.

“The Intersection green features include solar PV to power the commercial space and solar-assisted heating and hot water for the residential units,” the developers wrote on the project’s website.

Crews remained at the scene mopping up hot spots. Investigators are working to determine a cause and origin of the fire.