Just a couple hours after midnight in the wee hours of June 6, Madeleine Buzbee, a teacher living in an apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Inner Richmond, woke up to the “screaming sound” of a fire.

“It sounded like a microphone was up to a campfire,” she said. “It was so fucking loud.”

She looked out of her bedroom window and, from the reflections, saw the building next to hers engulfed in flames.

The four-alarm fire broke out on Fifth Avenue between Balboa and Anza streets, displacing 35 tenants and damaging five three-story residential buildings.

No tenants were injured, and a firefighter suffered minor injury. A cat and two rabbits died in the fire, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.

On a recent Thursday, the surrounding streets still smelled pungent. Contractors and an insurance worker, wearing respirators, were on-site at one of the houses, clearing out charred items from the apartments, assessing damages and testing lead and asbestos levels.

“It’s not inhabitable,” said Raymond, one of the contractors, as he walked out of the building at 583 Fifth Ave. It will take as least one year to rebuild the house, he said, and in the meantime, no tenants will be able to come back.

Raymond’s company is also responsible for providing security. The buildings have been broken into twice since June 6 — someone cut through the chained locks to access them, Raymond said.

The damage is most prominent in the back, with one building seemingly falling apart and another building’s wall black and charred.

One of the tenants, who lived on the second floor, is Kyle Standiford , “who is now facing the overwhelming uncertainty of having lost everything in the blaze — including the heartbreaking loss of his beloved cat,” according to a GoFundMe page. Standiford, his girlfriend Aurora and their surviving cat are hoping to be out of their hotel and move into a new place.

Chatchai Khamvongse is another tenant who lived in the same building with his pregnant girlfriend and his parents.

“Ten years ago, I moved into this house and started from zero,” Khamvongse wrote in Thai on his Facebook page on the afternoon of the fire. “Ten years I spent trying to build everything up. In just 10 minutes, I’m back at zero again.”

Buzbee’s landlord Tony Fong, who is 90 years old and has dementia, lived with his wife in the building next to Buzbee’s. The top unit, occupied by an immigrant couple with their young children, was also impacted by the fire.

Fong had purchased the house where Buzbee lived in around 1980, and raised his kids there. In 2005, he bought and moved to the house next door, which he had transformed into a couple of units.

On the night of the fire, Buzbee and Fong, in great shock, stayed on the sidewalk and watched the entire fire from across the street. “He just looked so scared,” Buzbee recalled.

Fong had put a lot of care in his backyard — he made a short fence between the two buildings, so that he could access both yards to take care of the plants.

“All of these beautiful fruit trees that he planted are all roasted,” Buzbee said.

Buzbee and her housemates still hope host a cleanup party in the yard and get the trees back in shape — “just because that was Tony’s calling in life.”