Fire Engines Photos

When I lived in Kuwait City, with a population of over 2.5 million, only a few areas of the city had hydrants, and many districts relied on tankers and static water tanks for everything. This was despite having modern high rise residential structures and some large industrial and commercial buildings in these places too. For this reason every one of the city’s 28 fire stations had a tanker, but these were usually only around 8000 to 10, 000 liters. The central fire station had the big boys. More than forty ( yes, 40! ) truck trailer articulated tankers on the same scale as this monster illustrated here! Although I never confirmed it exactly I believe each tank trailer contained around 30, 000 liters.

As the central station was right at the intersection of two very well placed major urban motorways they could be dispatched all over the city to every district quite rapidly - and be on site surprisingly quickly. Having seen a couple of these monsters “ on the bell “ I was not surprised that no motorist was ever going to get in their way. They did get to move along quite nicely - and happily sped along the shoulder when it got busy.

Added by Rob Johnson on 27 April 2026.

Thanks for a most informative and interesting insight Rob, much appreciated. I would be very interested to see some of this kit from Kuwait City.

Added by Andy Daley on 30 April 2026.

Andy: You are very welcome! It’s always interesting to see how different communities handle the challenges of fire and emergency response. As for Kuwait, there is a section on this site, but most of the postings are rather old, and these big tankers do not appear anywhere. I guess this is probably because it's likely they are not rolled out very often, and as far as I know they are also all based at the same fire station. So unless someone catches one at an incident or on the road you have to go the base station to see any of them.

When I was running an automotive import company there, we did supply six IVECO 6X6 12000 liter tankers with EMPL bodies as well as several Toyota Land Cruisers and HiLux 4X4 units to the fire service, but back then Mercedes and MAN were the main fire truck chassis suppliers. In more recent years it seems Scania have become more dominant.

Added by Rob Johnson on 04 May 2026.

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