Fire Engines Photos

The port city of Marseille has a hinterland of steep hillsides and deep canyons, filled with brush and highly flammable vegetation, with very difficult terrain and limited access to water supplies. It is in fact very similar to Southern California and poses many of the same kind of firefighting challenges.

With the growth of the city, many structures are now filling in gaps in the hillsides, and creating a major interface structure fire risk profile.

The Marins-Pompiers of Marseille, a section of the French navy, now operate 43 brush units, including both 4X4 and 6X6 Unimogs, as well as larger backup tankers on 8X4 Renault chassis, which are used to replenish the smaller front-line units. The 6X6 Unimogs with their much larger tanks are a recent addition to the fleet, to reduce the need for this time-consuming refill cycle.

There are also both water-dropping helicopters and fixed-wing aerial tankers in their inventory.

Added by Rob Johnson on 24 November 2013.

Marignane International Airport on the outskirts of Marseille is also the Civil Defense base for their amazing fleet of eighteen fixed wing air tankers- which are regularly deployed for brush fires in Provence. Some of their planes' photos are on this site...

There are also some very good videos of them in action on Youtube!

Added by Rob Johnson on 04 September 2021.

picture 36738 on this site shows one of the Civil Defense Canadair water bombers based at Marignane in action.

Added by Rob Johnson on 05 September 2021.

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