Big Wind is the answer to one of the most insidious types of fires. Oil fires. The vehicle, which weighs several tons, can withstand any inferno.
How do tanks and fighter jets become fire extinguishers? When a university, the Hungarian Armed Forces and an oil drilling company work together to find a solution to a specific problem, they come up with something that could easily roll across the battlefields of Warhammer 40K: Big Wind. The fire tank is the worst enemy of oil fires.
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A wall of water
What is Big Wind made of? Big Wind is based on a T-62 tank from the 1960s. Instead of a turret with cannons, engineers flanged two Tumanski R-11F-300 turbines on top. Such engines were also used in the MiG-21 interceptor – so a single one. Big Wind has two of them and does only one thing with them: blow away huge amounts of water with phenomenal force, which is sprayed from pipes into its thrust jet.
What is an oil fire? An oil fire occurs when an oil well or a pressurized pipeline catches fire. The never-ending, pressurized afterflow of oil makes it difficult to extinguish the fire. In addition, all metal is heated to such an extent that it ignites other material when it touches it.
How does Big Wind extinguish oil fires? The masses of water essentially tear a hole in the inferno. They displace the air and cut off the supply of oil. And the huge amounts of water cool the surrounding area on a large scale so that no new ignition takes place.
Storm in the Inferno
When was it used? The most famous deployment of the special firefighters with their heavy equipment took place in 1991. The first Gulf War had ended, but hellfire was raging from the depths of the Kuwaiti oil fields.
During their retreat, the defeated Iraqi army left behind an inferno of hundreds of fires as they sabotaged oil pipelines. Flames then darkened the sky for miles and for days. If you want to know more about this literal dark chapter, you can immerse yourself in hell on earth with the following video:
In Kuwait, the Big Wind firefighting tank only needed 12 to 40 seconds per fire, instead of many hours, which at best could be achieved with traditional extinguishing methods.
Does Big Wind still put out fires? Yes, it could still do it. But the last time the turbines roared was in response to a blowout from a natural gas well in 2000. Its main drawback is the enormously expensive logistics and the gigantic volumes of water that have to be supplied separately. Big Wind blows, but that’s all. But it does that so well that it would simply tear down and wash away a building that needed to be put out. So there is no sensible use for it other than oil fires.
As long as there are no real disasters like the one in Kuwait, more time-consuming, traditional methods of firefighting are usually sufficient.
The fire-fighting monster is now in a training facility in Szolnok, Hungary. You can find a video of a training session with it here on YouTube.
And if you are interested in devices, objects or situations that occur far away from our everyday lives, we have a special tip for you: Researchers are currently faced with a puzzle that shows the limits of earthly physics research. Every hour we receive a signal from space that shouldn’t actually exist.