“I started to smell smoke around 9 p.m.,” San Antonio resident Daniel Mendez said. “I opened the door, and to my surprise, there was a fire.”
Daniel Mendez is visiting North Padre Island on a family vacation.
While they were receiving some pizza around 9 o’clock Saturday night, the fire department was dispatched to the island for a grass fire in the sand dunes.
“This hill was bursting into flames,” Mendez’s son Colt Mendez said. “It’s on fire all across. There were so many emergency vehicles there.”
Fire crews from Corpus Christi, Aransas Pass, and Nueces County ESD 2 worked together to prevent the fire from spreading to nearby buildings.
The fire burned around 60 acres of land, and it’s expected to burn for six more hours, according to a city press release.
Like many others who saw the fire, the Mendez family is happy that first responders were able to extinguish it.
“We kinda saw them firsthand go right into the sand dunes with their equipment to manage the fire to contain it and to ensure that people on the property were safe,” said Colt.