Fire Engines Photos

It is very common to see large tankers in Portuguese fire service fleets, but this one, with its 32 tons of water on board, must be the record holder!

Added by Rob Johnson on 14 September 2024.

It reminds me of Kuwait City, which had only installed piped water mains and hydrants in a limited number of areas. Because of this, each of the 28 fire stations had a tanker, but these were usually conventional two axle units with 8,000 litre tanks. To cope with multiple alarm fires, the centrally located fire station near the intersection of highway 60 and the 5th ring road had a fleet of very large tankers, all built on a scale similar to this one. Huge. Maximum weight truck trailer combinations with similar Mercedes tractors, all at an enormous fire station which housed dozens of them!

Although too numerous to actually count on my visit, I was told they had 43 there. In a city of 2.5 million people without water mains everywhere - and no possibility of getting any reinforcements from anywhere else - it seemed to me to be a very unusual but necessary precaution. Very expensive to buy, staff and maintain so many, but obviously a lot less costly than retrofitting an entire city with water mains and hydrants!

I did spot one responding to an alarm on one occasion, and I was a bit surprised by how slowly it was being driven. Perhaps the driver was not too experienced in driving such a huge rig “ on the bell”.

Added by Rob Johnson on 14 September 2024.

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