Franchel Iglehart heard the fire alarms echo through her third-floor condominium complex Saturday in Far Northeast Dallas.

Dismissing it as another childish prank or malfunction, she jumped in the shower. Ten minutes later, a neighbor knocked on her door telling her this was the real thing.

Iglehart escaped with her two kids and watched as the six-alarm blaze destroyed 24 units in the 12000 block of Abrams Road.

“That fire is coming out of my apartment,” said Iglehart, who repeated the words and began crying.

Her aunt, Alisa Stevenson, comforted her as they watched the building burn.

“Ya’ll made it out,” Stevenson told Iglehart. “Material things can be replaced. You’re out here, that’s all that matters.”

Fire officials were called to the Hearthwood Condos about 12:30 p.m. By 1:50 p.m. the blaze had prompted six alarms with more than 120 firefighters working to contain it. Traffic slowed along Interstate 635 as plumes of smoke billowed across the freeway.

In all, 24 units in the complex were destroyed. The American Red Cross helped displaced families. Nobody was injured, although paramedics treated at least three people who were standing in the heat watching the building burn.

Witnesses told fire officials and police that teenagers throwing matches down a trash chute may have started the fire. Dallas-Fire Rescue spokesman Jason Evans said he couldn’t confirm that.

“We don’t know where it started. The bottom line is it totaled the entire building,” he said. A damage estimate was not available Saturday night.

Condo residents, many of them elderly or low-income, were facing the prospect of starting over with nothing.

“Everything is just gone,” said resident Brittany Deboskie, looking at her gutted third-floor corner apartment she had shared with her sister. “We don’t have anything left. Everything in there was ours; we worked hard for it.”

The apartment fire is the third in the last four days for Dallas firefighters. On Wednesday, a fire closed the high-rise Indigo apartments. That blaze was blamed on a malfunction in the rooftop heating and cooling system.

On Thursday, two dozen units at the Millennium Pointe Apartments in Far East Dallas were damaged or destroyed. A teenage boy was hospitalized in that fire, which residents blamed on a woman living there.