Early on, they understood the $33 million luxury apartment complex was lost. The heat was too great. The fire was moving too fast.

Instead, firefighters decided to use a strategy of douse and retreat.

The blaze started shortly before 9 a.m. Friday at The Park at Ybor City construction site. By 2 p.m., both the apartment complex and the nearby Ybor City post office had been destroyed.

Some firefighters crawled inside the three-story apartment buildings to soak the wood. It didn't matter. Hungry flames ripped through the pressed wood structure and jumped streets.

``You have to look at what you are going to write off,'' said Robert Simmons, special operations chief for Tampa Fire Rescue.

``We wanted to protect the exposure and get ahead of it.''

Additional fires grew from the incredible heat. Firefighters could hear the floors crashing to the ground, glass exploding and the wood crackling all around them.

The first section of the apartment complex, between 19th and 20th streets, was reduced to rubble in five minutes. When the fire finished there, it jumped across 19th Street, heading west, and started on another.

``We couldn't get our streams up quick enough,'' said Tampa Fire Rescue Capt. Bill Wade.

On the average day, the city has 120 firefighters on duty. Friday, they needed 150 just for the enormous fire in Ybor City. About 40 units from two counties and six agencies fought the fire, including firefighters from St. Petersburg, Temple Terrace, MacDill Air Force Base, Largo and Seminole.

And it wasn't just one fire; there were many. And many buildings were in danger: Oliva Tobacco Co. to the south, the U-Haul building and the Ybor City post office to the north, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Church to the west, and the Ybor City Brewing Co. to the east.

The army of firefighters tried to contain the fire from the streets and from high in aerial trucks. Others soaked buildings endangered nearby as the wall of fire and boiling black smoke moved closer.

At one point, firefighters had to create a curtain of water to protect their hoses and trucks.

The heat melted the vinyl siding of Oliva's, but firefighters kept it soaked. And saved it.

``I can't thank them enough,'' owner John Oliva said later.

That approach did not work for the Ybor City post office. The building's metal roof worked as a conductor and turned the space below into an oven, with temperatures firefighters said might have been as high as 1200 degrees, igniting the roof rafters.

Before flames engulfed the building, the metal was so hot that a firefighter in heavy boots had to hop across the roof.

``It can be very frustrating,'' Simmons said later. ``Even though there was no loss of life, there was a high dollar loss. I don't like to see the loss of a major building.''