How residents of Sinton neighborhood banded together to fight wildfires

Yahoo

08-03-2025

SINTON — When the Welder Fire — one of two major fires to hit San Patricio County — ignited on Tuesday night and carried southeast in the wind, some Sinton homeowners could see the flames spreading toward their houses.
Not knowing when first responders would arrive to begin putting out the blazes, the homeowners decided to pool their own resources to fight the fires together.
Chris Hinkelmann, a Sinton resident who lives at 221 E. Main St., saw the flames and smoke rising from the brushy area behind his house at the intersection of East Welder Street and North Kohler Avenue, just 354 feet from his property, when he went into his backyard at about 3 p.m. on Tuesday, he said.
Storms of dust swirled through the air, and thick, black smoke poured into the neighborhood. The residents heard popping sounds like firecrackers.
Soon, the residents saw that the fires had reached the brush line and flared up to the top of the trees.
'It was confusion and chaos,' Hinkelmann said. 'We saw all these city trucks drive over there and didn't really know what to do.'
He and his neighbor were spraying their yard and house when one of the city trucks caught fire, he said.
Hinkelmann called the fire department, but refrained from calling 911, not wanting to divert resources from the city trucks that had driven to the northwest, where the fires were known to have started, he said.
At 5 p.m., city trucks from Sinton were driving around the neighborhood streets, and troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety went door to door to check on residents. The local school district sent school buses to evacuate people.
Hinkelmann said he knew that he needed to evacuate, but he didn't want to leave his cats, belongings or new house behind.
A block away, his neighbor, a former volunteer firefighter, had begun pulling out fire hoses at the intersection of East Welder Street and North Kohler Avenue, he said.
Hinkelmann had two fire extinguishers and a year-old garden hose that he'd converted into two hoses, joining a group of about seven other homeowners, including a neighbor who is a retired volunteer firefighter and a police officer from Taft Independent School District.
Wearing pajamas, shorts and a pair of slip-on Converse All-Stars, he grabbed the supplies and walked toward the brush line, meeting three other neighbors at the corner.
'It wasn't like we had a plan — more like a blind reaction,' he said.
The group strung the garden hoses together and started spraying the fire at the brush line.
The neighbors drove a brush truck up and down the street, spraying the ditch and vegetation.
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'It wasn't one big fire in one location — it's all these small fires,' Hinkelmann said. 'But once we had the flare-up that was reaching the tops of the trees, that's when you knew it was real.'
People had driven into the neighborhood and parked their cars right up to North Kohler Avenue to get a look at the wildfire, he said, making it more difficult to access the area.
By then, the smoke was so thick that he couldn't see to the end of the street, he said.
If the volunteer fire department hadn't arrived at that point, the fire would have spread to the highway, engulfing the neighborhood, he said.
Hinkelmann said he didn't return home with the hoses until about 9 p.m., and that the power and internet were both out.
Another neighborhood resident, Nadia Cordova, was getting a ride home from a friend when a neighbor called to tell her there was a fire across the street from the house, she said.
Arriving home, she saw sparks and flames blowing in from the dry brush and smoke so thick that she couldn't see what was going on, she said.
City workers hadn't arrived, so she grabbed a garden hose and started spraying the fire across the street from her yard.
'I was like, 'My god, please help me' — I'm not the perfect strong woman to do this, but I had to think right away,' she said. 'I had to take the nozzle off, and it was hard for me to take it off. God willing that I was able to take it off and just let the water gush all over the whole property.'
By 4:15, all the trees across the street were gone, she said.
While told to evacuate, Cordova also didn't want to leave her house or her pets — three dogs, a cat and a bearded dragon — unattended at home.
Her home was unscathed by the fire.
Neighbors who lived across the street lost their houses due to the way the wind blew in from the west and straight into the neighborhood, she said.
'I feel so sad,' she said. 'My heart hurts that they lost everything.'
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This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Sinton residents fight wildfires with neighborhood resources