Fire Engines Photos

Very impressive bit of kit, but I suspect it is a rather costly alternative when it comes to tackling forest and brush fires. Although this only requires one or two crew members, it seems not to be all that maneuverable off road. The optimal approach is very often to have multiple smaller units with lower outputs and high mobility levels able to move around the periphery of this type of incident...

It would probably be most useful when deployed on forest roads to wet down vegetation near an intended firebreak - a job now handled by existing brush pumpers and tankers in Germany as well as by regular water tenders and even urban pumpers.

So it is probably an idea which was born after the disastrous and unusually extensive German forest fires this year; these really stretched fire services and their existing equipment, a lot of which was not all that well adapted to this kind of work...





Added by Rob Johnson on 28 November 2022.

France, along with many other Mediterranean countries, has taken brush and forest fires very seriously, and the French fleet of over 4000 brush pumpers and tankers actually outnumbers their structural firefighting pump fleet. But global warming has brought major vegetation fire incidents to more northerly latitudes, including Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK (where London was unable to answer any new calls for days, as every available unit was already deployed). Although these countries all have a few locally based dedicated brush or forest firefighting trucks, some new ideas need to be brought into action pretty soon if this new fire risk profile is to be properly addressed.

This Magirus effort may not be the answer to the maiden’s prayer, but it does at least show somebody is thinking!

Added by Rob Johnson on 29 November 2022.

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