Fire ripped through a De Witt apartment building on Sunday morning leaving 10 people homeless and sending three to the hospital. It happened just after six in the 500 block of 9th St. and it took crews almost five hours to put out the blaze.

Firefighters say everyone who was home at the time of the blaze got out safely. It started in a first floor apartment and spread quickly throughout the building, gutting the inside and leaving many residents wondering what's next.

TV6 spoke with one who had been in Davenport at the time of the fire. She says after losing everything, she's not sure what she's going to do next.

"I just got here and seen that my apartment was on fire today," says Kelly Grober, who lived on the building's third floor. "I have no place to live now, all my stuff was in there."

It's a phone call she says she'll never forget. She was staying in Davenport when all of a sudden her mom called to tell her her apartment building was on fire.

"Everybody in there has just lost everything they own and they don't have nothing now," she says.

Firefighters say they did everything they could to save the building. When they arrived on scene, they found smoke pouring from a first floor apartment. Upon getting inside the building, they realized this fire was unlike any other they had fought before.

"We went in to make an interior attack at the apartment," says DeWitt Fire Chief John Durken. "We thought we had it. We found it up in a big void in the ceiling. From then on she kind of went downhill on us."

The fire spreading quickly as responders from three different departments tried to figure out how to put the blaze out.

"It was time consuming and mind consuming trying to figure out what to do next," Durken says. "We couldn't make access, it was too slippery out there so we didn't have any lean-against ladders to go up to the building. We had to do it all from the aerial."

Now as firefighters sweep up the pieces of the building, residents here are left to pick up the pieces of their lives. Grober says she's not sure how she's going to make it through.

"I haven't seen my kids in seven years and everything I had of them was in there, so that's one of the main things that upsets me more than anything," she says.

Grober says she'll be staying with her mom in the meantime while she tries to figure out where she's going next. Meanwhile, Chief Durken tells us three residents who were home at the time of the fire were taken to the hospital with unknown injuries. They have been treated and released. The Red Cross was on scene and they are helping all families find somewhere to stay.

That building sits right in the heart of De Witt's downtown. Residents there and other business owners watched this all happen.

Many of them tell us they sympathize with residents in that apartment building, but are relieved the fire didn't spread any farther.

"I'm very shocked," says business owner Debbie Thien. "I'm just grateful that the De Witt firefighters, Grand Mound, Clinton, seems like we have a lot of them on scene and they were able to get it out very quickly."

She says her business sustained some minor water damage. It will be open tomorrow.

Crews are still working to determine what caused the fire.