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Fire Engines Photos

 
Brandweer Vlissingen-Middelburg Dennis Rapier
Fire Engine Photos
No: 8480   Contributor: Marcel Sloover   Year: 2008   Manufacturer: Dennis   Country: The Netherlands
Brandweer Vlissingen-Middelburg Dennis Rapier

A 1999 Dennis Rapier ML with a bodywork from Touw-Plastisol-Godiva. The unit is stationed at the Stromenweg Fire station. Pumpcapacity : 3250 l/m low pressure and 250 l/m high pressure. Watertank contains 1600 litres.
Picture added on 09 June 2008
add commentComments:
You cannot beat a good Rapier!

Added by Barry on 09 June 2008.
With so many U.K.fire brigades these days turning to Volvo, Scania, Man, Mercedes,
and other foreign fire engine manufacturers for there appliances, its nice to
see an appliance made by such a respected company like Dennis elswhere apart
from in the U.K.The Rapier in my opinion was a classic fire appliance.

Added by Pete Matten on 09 June 2008.
Being from Boston Mass. in the good old U.S.A., I never get used to seeing blue lights on top of Fire Apparatus. Thanks for the shot.

Added by Howard A. Baldwin on 26 September 2012.
Howard - they were originally fitted to police cars in Germany in the 1930s, then quite rapidly adopted for German fire service use. After WWII, they slowly spread to other European countries, which until the 1960s to 1990s were usually using orange colored warning lights, or sometimes red.

Now, they are a European standard on all emergency vehicles, and in Australia they have been adopted in conjunction with red.

Some police departments in the US, such as Chicago and New Orleans, have used blue lights for decades, and a small number of US departments have begun adding them to the normal red, clear and yellow lights. Volunteer firefighters in New York State are allowed to fit blue lights on their personal vehicles while responding, but blue is not common on their apparatus.

The big advantages claimed for blue is that only emergency vehicles are allowed to have them, so they are extremely distinctive, and that they are highly visible at night. The disadvantage is that they are much less visible in bright and sunny weather, but of course this is not very often a serious problem in Northern Europe!

European trucks tend to have a much smaller number of emergency warning lights than is the norm in the US, so there is less of a tendency to have a swath of different colors and types (flashers, strobes, revolvers, spinners, etc).

After all these years, European drivers have gotten used to the idea that blue=emergency vehicle, and that its time to get out of the way.

They also identify the incident scene, and standard-mounted blue lights are often used with signage to close off the road or redirect traffic. Some countries, incuding Spain, France and Germany, also use orange scene lights, especially on high-speed highways, as these are familiar with drivers, being already used by construction and maintainence crews to slow and/or manage traffic flow.

Added by Rob Johnson on 26 September 2012.
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