A Halifax woman was hospitalized Saturday night after jumping from a second storey window to escape a fire in her high-rise apartment building.

Halifax Fire received a call at 11:30 p.m. Saturday to a fire at a ten storey apartment building near the Dalhousie University campus.

"We were wrapping up for the evening and all of a sudden we saw all of the flashing lights outside, and obviously we knew something was going on," says neighbour Owen Carrington.

The woman was trapped by the fire and couldn't reach her door to escape, so she jumped out the window to safety, breaking her leg in the process.

It's the second time in as many weeks in the Halifax area that someone has needed to jump from a building to escape a fire.

Last week the Muhindo family jumped from a window of their Dartmouth townhouse after the furnace exploded and engulfed their house in flames.

It's a dramatic exit, but one that officials say is rare.

"Smoke detectors are mandatory now, our children are educated in the school system on fire escapes and fire safety, and the calls like this are becoming less all the time," says Greg Hebb, an acting Division Commander with Halifax Fire.

Hebb says before this week, he hadn't received a call of someone needing to jump to safety for years.

"This building here is a highrise building with several elevators and couple extra stairwells. It's just unfortunate that the woman got stuck on the wrong side of the fire," explains Hebb.

The fire is believed to have started somewhere in the woman's living room and was contained to the one apartment unit.

Neighbour Cody Timmons saw the lights from the fire trucks out his living room window.

"At one point I counted five fire trucks and maybe six police cars, and they had the line just evacuating out of the building. It was a scary sight for sure," says Timmons.

He says he could smell the smoke from his front door.

"The most alarming part was all the lights, and then we looked outside and saw a bunch of firemen tossing things out the side of the window,” adds Timmons.

Firefighters extinguished the flames within ten minutes, and worked to ventilate smoke from the rest of the building.

The cause of the fire isn't known yet, but Halifax Fire's initial investigation shows the couch was likely ablaze in the middle of the living room, which prevented the woman from reaching her front door.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Emily Baron-Cadloff.