PILOT: The Keokuk Duplex Fire | S01 E01

It’s morning, three days before Christmas, 1999. Keokuk, Iowa. A small city along the banks of the Mississippi River, home to about 12,500 people. In a duplex on Franklin Street, a four-year-old boy named Jacob turns on a kitchen stove while his mother is still asleep. The burners start some plastic high-chair trays stored on top of the stove on fire. That fire soon spreads throughout the kitchen. Jacob runs upstairs to wake his mother, Melissa. She finds the smoke and heat too intense to get past it to her other children’s bedroom. The fire in the old house would be like no other the Keokuk Fire Department had ever experienced. On this episode of True Fire, we’ll look back at the Keokuk Apartment Fire tragedy and find out what lessons were learned.