A man was rescued from the roof of a building after an early morning fire in Glace Bay, N.S., Friday.

No one was injured, but 10 people are homeless.

"When I arrived there the police were in the process of assisting people out of the building," said Jim Taylor, Glace Bay's fire chief.

"It's a fourteen unit apartment building that used to be the Glebe house for St. Anthony's church at one time. There was one person on the roof that we had to take off the roof with a ladder."

The fire broke out around 1:00 a.m. on Dominion Street. Taylor said the flames engulfed the back of the building and began shooting out the upstairs windows.

Firefighters were on scene for four hours.

"It did extensive damage to the roof structure, the back wall, the side wall as well as the inside compartment," said Taylor.

"In this case here there were five layers of roofing shingles which caused us a bit of trouble to put out. The roof is one of the old type it's almost a flat roof and there's not much room up there to try and tear things down and try to tear them apart, so it gave us a bit of trouble there. The back side of the building, the left rear corner of the building is totally destroyed."

Taylor said the building will most likely be uninhabitable for some time.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.