At least nine people were killed and 30 hospitalized after a fire tore through a Massachusetts assisted living facility — with desperate seniors found hanging out windows and screaming for help, officials said Monday.

Five firefighters were also injured as more than 30 off-duty smoke-eaters also raced to tackle the deadly five-alarm blaze that broke out around 9:30 p.m. Sunday at the Gabriel House Assisted Living Residence in Fall River, fire officials said.

“This is an unfathomable tragedy for the families involved and the Fall River community,” Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon said.

“Crews were met with heavy fire coming through the main entrance and multiple people hanging out the windows, looking to be rescued,” Bacon told reporters outside the Gabriel House facility.

“That is something that none of us want to ever pull up to,” the fire chief said.

“They showed up to the scene, obviously fire, smoke, and victims screaming for rescue out windows, and it makes for a chaotic scene.”

“Every firefighter on duty in the city was here,” Bacon said, as well as about 30 who were off duty but “got up here quick enough to affect those rescues.”

The cause of the blaze, which was contained to one wing of the building, is still under investigation.

“Several” oxygen tanks were stored inside the building for use by the elderly residents and posed a potential fire risk, Bacon said.

However, the tanks were “irrelevant to the fire at this time,” he said.

Around seven Gabriel House residents still needed to be placed in new facilities as of Monday afternoon, Mayor Coogen later told the Herald News.

Survivors of the blaze described being pushed back by the sheer strength of the fire as they screamed for help from the windows.

“I got up, I opened my door, smoke just threw me back into the room, and I tried again to get out,” Loraine Ferrara, a Gabriel House resident, told WHDH.

“I was near the exit door, but I couldn’t reach the exit door. The smoke and the sprinkler system was too much for me, so I went into my bathroom. I yelled out my window, I yelled down, ‘Help, help’ to the fire department, and a firefighter came up and carried me down the ladder,” she said.

Another resident said many people had been trapped on the top floor of the three-story facility.

“I mean, how sad. People on the third flood, on that side, didn’t stand a chance. And people on this side, unless you really knew what time of day it was, didn’t stand a chance,” resident Donna Murphy told WHDH.

The fact that many of the windows had air conditioning units made it harder to rescue vulnerable residents.

In many cases, the units had to be pushed out onto the ground to allow emergency crews access.

Many of the residents had to be physically carried out of the facility due to mobility issues.

“The windows that would have affected the best rescues had the ACs in them, so rescues had to be done through smaller windows,” Bacon told the Herald News.

“I would venture to guess … that there were more rescues out of this building last night than there have been in the 23 years that I’ve been a firefighter combined,” he said.

A number of the residents require daily medication, and urgent calls were made to local pharmacies to replace meds left behind and destroyed in the blaze.

The bodies of some of the dead remained inside the facility Monday morning, Fall River Mayor Paul Coogen told WJAR. At least one of those hospitalized remains in critical condition.

A family notification center was set up at the nearby St. Anne’s Hospital chapel on Monday morning.

It is hoped that new accommodation will be found for all of the residents by Tuesday.