Muscatine Assistant Fire Chief Mike Hartman remembers the shock on his crew’s faces the day more than 16 years ago they lost a longtime member of their team.
“It was a bad situation all around,” he said. “We did everything we could to get to him, but unfortunately there was nothing we could do.”
After the crew had extinguished the fatal blaze, Hartman said, the loss really settled in.
“Initially, I think we were all just shocked at what had happened,” he said. “There was also a lot of questioning — could we have done more? Could we have done something differently? Even though we knew that we couldn’t. And I think that’s normal.”
Michael Kruse had been a Muscatine firefighter for 27 years when he died Sept. 14, 2002.
Hartman said Kruse was one of two firefighters working on the roof of a three-story wooden house that was consumed by fire when he fell through the roof.