Technically speaking, the fire truck you see here is not a fire truck; it should be called a fire tank jet, or jet fire tank, because it is actually a Frankenstein creation that composes of a WWII-era Russian T34 tank with a pair of MiG-21 fighter jet engines bolted on top of it. As you can see, the turret is no longer in existence and in its place, are jet engines good for 27,000 pounds of thrust each. And what the hell are jet engines doing atop of a tank? Well, to fight fire, of course, by the power of the immense gust kicked out by the MiG-21 jet engines.
Six nozzles on top of the jet engines spit out water, which is then carry forth to the raging fire at up to 220 gallons per second by the the jet engines’ exhaust. This crazy fire fighting contraption was created by Hungarian engineers and was used to combat oil well fires. It was used as far back as 1991 to quell the oil fires set by Saddam Hussein’s army as they were (unwillingly) shown the way out of Kuwait. We are not sure how old or what version of the iteration seen in the video below, but regardless, we are equally impressed.
Appropriately dubbed, Big Wind, this arguably the world’s most powerful fire truck requires just three crews to operated: a driver, a controller that commandeers the jet engines and the water jets, and finally, a fire chief who barks the order to the former two via a remote-control unit (presumably, it mean to say, radio unit) and also stay the hell clear of this monster.
For some reasons, we find this oversize, overpowered water cannon a little post-apocalyptic. Perhaps, it is because of combination of the almost-bared jet engines and the fact that it was originally designed as a decontamination machine for Cold War-era tanks in the event of a chemical attack. But don’t ever dream about using it to wash your car, cos’ it will most definitely blow your regular sedan away after it has done smashing up the windows and dealing some serious bodywork damage. Check out the video and be awed.
via CarVideos
