Nineteen residents, including four children, were displaced Friday afternoon after a three-alarm fire spread through six condominium townhouse apartments and damaged three others in two neighboring buildings in Ewa Beach.

"All our things are just gone," Monalisa Tupua, 34, said after assessing the damage to the condo she and her husband purchased two years ago. Tupua’s husband and children had just left on a trip to Los Angeles, and she added, "I’m just glad that they’re not here and no one was hurt and no one was home."

Shortly before 7 p.m. Friday, fire officials allowed residents, one by one, to enter their homes to retrieve their belongings.

The Red Cross assisted families living in eight of nine units (one was unoccupied) of buildings T and U of the Ewa Apartments at Kulana, formerly known as Kulana Village. The 205-unit complex, built in 1969-70, is located at 91-613 Kuilioloa Place near Pohakea Elementary School.

Occupants escaped on their own, for the most part, unscathed from the blaze, but a 26-year-old man cut his hand while breaking windows looking for anyone still inside the burning buildings, Hono­lulu Fire Department spokes­man David Jenkins said.

Eleven fire companies and 45 personnel responded to the scene at 1:24 p.m., but no one was in the structures when they arrived. They cleared all rooms of one unit where a parked car raised suspicions someone was home, Jenkins said.

Jenkins said the scope of this fire made this one unusual, as a typical fire is often confined to a single unit or single-family home.

"Whenever you have a fire that involves multiple structures, multiple families, impacting nine families," it’s rare, he said of the three-alarm fire, and an "indication of its scope."

But as residents were allowed in, a bright spot in the day prompted neighbors to erupt in applause. Leo Ridela, 26, discovered his cat, Chandler, under a bed and brought the Persian out wet and shivering.

"I’m overwhelmed," he said. "I thought he was dead."

David Tafua, who lived in Apartment U-3, which appeared completely gutted, thought there was no way his dog Sole, a 1-year-old gray pit bull, could have escaped from his enclosed back patio. "I was shocked when they found him."

Tafua and his wife, Diane, were on a family outing with their sons when the fire broke out and neighbors called them.

"I’m numb," said his wife. "When you buy a condo, you assume you’ll never have a fire. It’s my kids’ home. It’s a total loss."

The family is still missing their 6-year-old black-and-white male Chihuahua, Uso.

Kevin Tabangcura, 24, whose family has lived at the apartment as long as he can remember, heard the neighbors’ dogs barking while he was playing video games with a friend when his brother ran down to warn them.

He called 911 and told his brother to grab their cat while he went out with a fire extinguisher and began shooting down a tarp covering a gazebo in their back patio.

Tafua’s gray pit bull ran past him into his back patio, mangled, with burnt flesh on his sides, scrapes from forcing himself under a fence.

That’s when his friend told him they had better get going.

Tabangcura, said, "From what I saw, it’s where it happened (Unit U-3). The wind was kicking it toward my building."

The two units’ back patio roofs are about 6 to 8 feet apart, he noted.

But Brittany Robinson, 21, from Building V behind Building U, said she ran into unit U-1, opened up the patio door and saw "it had hopped onto the patio and it was coming over from the opposite house (Building T). It came from that side and shot up on the patio roof and spread."

Camilla Yorong, 58, said she got a call while at work in town.

"I wanted to faint," she said, but she drove carefully home. "I was shaking. If it’s burnt, what you going to do? If it’s not, I praise God. If it is, I still praise God."

A friend came and stayed with her, and a neighbor came and gave her a big hug.

A 41-year-old resident said of the townhouse complex, "Over here everybody helps in this area. Everybody knows everybody."