Fire destroys Scott City home

When Monty Keesee heard the pops Thursday afternoon, he initially thought they were gunfire.

"I was doing my work here, and I heard all this popping and stuff going on," he said.

Keesee said he saw a man run past the new apartment where he was painting some boards. Moments later, he said, the man "came busting in the door," asking him to call 911 because his house was on fire.

No one was hurt in the fire, which started a little after noon Thursday in an attached garage at 729 Grove St., spreading quickly through the two-story house, said Jay Cassout, Scott City fire chief.

Keesee said he ran across the street to find the front of a truck burning and the garage fully involved in flames.

"It was getting it," he said. "The garage was totally engulfed, and it was going into the house at that point."

The cause of the fire had not been determined Thursday afternoon, but Keesee speculated a spark might have ignited some fumes in the garage.

"He's always working on cars over there -- auto body work, compressors running and fumes coming out of it," said Keesee, who owns a pair of triplex apartment buildings across the street. "... There was a lot of popping and explosions in that garage."

The man and woman who lived in the house were uninjured, and their children were not home at the time of the fire, Keesee said.

"Nobody hurt. That's the first thing I asked them," he said.

Crews from the Scott City, Cape Girardeau, New Hamburg-Benton-Commerce and Gordonville fire departments responded to the blaze, which took about an hour and a half to bring under control, Cassout said.

The architecture of the house -- an older structure that had undergone several renovations, including the addition of a second floor -- hampered firefighters' efforts, Cassout said.

"The fire was hard to get to," he said.

Cassout said the house was a total loss.

"That's terrible right here at Christmas time," Keesee said.

epriddy@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

729 Grove St., Scott City, MO