A fire ripped through a third floor apartment in Hartwick Towers downtown early Friday morning, leaving several evacuated residents displaced for the night.

Jerry Engle, a firefighter with the Riverdale Fire Department, said two women were rescued from the gutted apartment. But Prince George’s County Fire Department Spokesman Mark Brady said in a a statement that no one was hospitalized. The cause of the fire, which Brady said started in the bedroom, is being investigated.

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Residents of the six-story condominum complex, which is not equipped with sprinklers, described a chaotic scene after the fire broke out. No fire alarms sounded, residents said, and they banged on doors to urge neighbors to evacuate. Brady said that when firefighters arrived, a “hectic evacuation” was underway.

Multiple fire departments responded to the scene, setting numerous ladders along the outside of the building to transport equipment. Brady said the two-alarm fire brought 65 firefighters and paramedics to the scene.

Students who urged their neighbors to evacuate said many were oblivious to the emergency.

“There were people five, six stories up who didn’t even know there was a fire,” said junior journalism major Ali Libfeld.

Brady said because of the building’s age, the alarm is operated manually and does not respond to smoke or heat. Students who live in the building said they pulled alarms, but none sounded. Investigators are checking the building to confirm that manual alarms were pulled and will look into students’ complaints that the building’s alarms were non-functional, Brady said.

Junior kinesiology major Matt Stein, who lives on the third floor, said he found out about the fire from other students. He said the smoke detector in his apartment went off, but not the building fire alarm.

Senior communications major Clare Meyers said she lives in the apartment above the one hit by the fire, and said she heard a loud sound from the window below and went to her window.

“I heard the popping noise, but I never would have noticed,” Meyers said. “It was like something out of a movie.”

Senior staff writer Ben Block contributed to this report. overlydbk@gmail.com; jeff.amoros@gmail.com