PHILIPSBURG When — Samuel Skipper opened his front door Friday, he went from worried to alarmed.

Smoke, just a wispy presence in his apartment, billowed inside from the hall.

“That’s when I knew something was really wrong,” he said.

He was among the residents displaced by an early morning fire that gutted his two-story building at 225 Fifth St. Nobody was hurt, though one ground-floor resident was treated at Clearfield Hospital for smoke inhalation, said Justin Butterworth, assistant fire chief for the Philipsburg Fire Department, the partnership between Hope and Reliance fire companies.

Butterworth said the building, originally a beer distributor, contained six apartments, five of which were occupied at the time of the fire. He said six or seven tenants were living in the building; state

police put the total at nine.

Several fire companies from Centre, Clearfield and Blair companies responded to the blaze, which left the tan brick building a charred shell and collapsed its metal roof. Butterworth said the second floor was engulfed when firefighters first arrived at about 5:15 a.m.

“We didn’t have a chance to get ahead of it,” he said.

Witnesses described an inferno glowing in the predawn sky, with flames shooting from the second floor apartments.

“It was coming out (one) window like a blowtorch,” Terry Cook said.

Cook, who said he lives nearby and had been planning to move into the building next month, had been storing furniture and belongings downstairs. Friday, he spent trying to salvage what he could from soggy possessions reeking of smoke.

Once he learned of the fire, Skipper said, he rushed to his neighbors’ door and woke the older couple.

“I pounded on the door for 10 minutes until they came out,” Skipper said. “I helped them and their dog out.”

But Skipper lost his black cat, Midnight, found dead in the ruins. He also lost everything else, except the phone and charger he grabbed while leaving.

Salvation Army and Red Cross representatives helped provide food, clothing and shelter for the building’s tenants.

Butterworth said about 75 firefighters took almost three hours to control the fire, then two more to fully extinguish it. No one was injured, he said.

Firefighters kept the fire from spreading, but heat and smoke damaged the siding of one adjacent home. The brick sides and metal roof, acting like a lid before it collapsed, helped contain the blaze, Butterworth said.

But the roof also hampered firefighters, who couldn’t use an aerial truck to punch a hole and gain access as they normally would, Butterworth said.

He said firefighters, once they learned all the residents had escaped, fought the fire from the outside.

Throughout Friday morning, state police from the Philipsburg barracks inspected the taped-off building and interviewed tenants and neighborhood residents. The fire is under investigation.

Trooper Scott Swasing, the assistant fire marshal, said he and other investigators think the fire started on the second floor. He declined to say if they consider the fire suspicious.

“Right now, we’re still trying to determine the origin and cause,” he said, calling the building “a total loss.”

In addition to Hope and Reliance, the responding fire companies included three from Centre County: Port Matilda, Alpha and Mountain Top, out of Sandy Ridge.

Borough employees brought coffee to firefighters and helped direct traffic away from the closed-off block.

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.