Firefighters responded to a report of a vehicle on fire on the Peninsula beach Wednesday morning.
Peninsula resident Jonnie Bepper was driving his Ford F-150 FX4 pickup about a mile past the Cranberry beach approach when he began to smell burnt rubber.
“I started to see sparks from under the dashboard and heard a big pop,” he said as he waited in the sand dunes with his dog Rosie for Pacific County Fire District No. 1 personnel to arrive. “It sounded like fireworks.”
Bepper said flames began to come from the center of his dashboard. He threw the truck in park and grabbed his dog.
“It was a brand new truck,” he said, still watching the fire.
No one was injured in the incident.
A crew from Fire District 1 had to wait for four-wheel drive vehicles to get to the scene and took less than an hour to put the fire out.
Fire Chief Jacob Brundage said the cause of the fire was still unknown and with high tide coming, it would be too dangerous for his crews to investigate the scene at the moment.
Brundage said while he didn’t suspect anything suspicious, there might be an investigation at another time.