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Chris Rogers woke up Thursday morning to every developer’s nightmare. His building was on fire.

He turned on the news at 5 a.m. to see that the lead story was about a five-alarm fire that gutted his $2.9 million, five-story apartment building on the corner of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Monroe Street. The project was 60 percent to 70 percent completed, he said.

“It was going to go fast from here on out,” said Rogers, who owns Phase II Development in Lake Oswego. “We were looking at wrapping up sometime in November.”

Rogers said the project will continue, but the setback is nonetheless heartbreaking.

“We’re already two years into this,” he said.

Michael Silva, a spokesman for Portland Fire and Rescue, said no one was injured in the fire that started around 4:15 a.m. All 135 on-duty firefighters responded to the scene while Clackamas County and Tualatin Valley and Vancouver, Wash., firefighters responded to other fire calls.

Although firefighters had the blaze under control within hours, they continued to extinguish flames until around noon.

Residents from some 10 nearby homes were evacuated as the fire spread to two or three nearby buildings, Silva said. The heat melted the bodies of parked cars and plastic recycling bins, he added.

As bad he as feels for himself and his multimillion-dollar project, Rogers said, he feels worse for the neighbors.

“This was just a building that was under construction,” he said. “Those were homes with people living there with their families and memories. While we’re surveying the damage, what’s really sad is what happened to those people.”

Tahran Architecture and Planning is the architecture firm for the project, and Pavilion Construction is the general contractor. The receptionist at Pavilion said the company had no comment to make about the fire, but would issue a formal statement to the press later.

The 12,000-square-foot complex was designed for 46 market-rate apartments and 14 parking spaces. Architect Ralph Tahran said in an interview last year that plans called for 50 percent one-bedroom units, 40 percent studios and 10 percent two-bedroom units.

“It’s a very urban-looking project, which I think the whole Eliot neighborhood has embraced,” Tahran said in the interview.

“By (going) contemporary, we’re not trying to mimic any Victorian notions or anything like that,” he added. “We’re dealing with proportions that we think is the character of the neighborhood.”

The project received little or no opposition from neighbors.

“This is the reality of the zoning here, so we’ve not tried really hard to fight any of the projects that have been proposed,” Allan Rudwick of the Eliot Neighborhood Association said last year.

Rogers said the building was in a particularly precarious state.

“The building was at its most vulnerable state because it didn’t have Sheetrock yet,” he said. “The wood was just sitting there like a kindling box. It was ready to go.”