Special Vehicles and Equipment in Fire Operations Used in Different Regions

Abstract

Different parts of the world have different disasters or fire and technical rescue events. Economic, infrastructural and natural environmental differences cause great variances. The nations employ various organisations, depending on the available possibilities, with diverse technical solutions to eliminate the sources of fire, disaster, incident dangers. In case of fires and technical rescue occasions that have already occurred and require intervention and pose a direct threat to human life, physical integrity and property, these tasks are typically performed by fire brigade organisations. These organisations also carry out more or less extensive activities in their areas of responsibility; however, national solutions may involve the use of firefighting vehicles and equipment that differ significantly from one neighbouring country to another.
The article presents the general firefighting vehicles used internationally and in Hungary and their characteristic capabilities, together with the widely used technical equipment and devices worldwide, built-in or mobile firefighting machines. In this paper a wide-ranging inspection of firefighting vehicles are demonstrated, and the description of the firefighting equipment can be interpreted together with the carrier vehicles. By special fire engines, the author here means vehicles that are on standby in each country, but only in small numbers and only alerted a few times a year. An important aspect in this category is that the design and equipment of these firefighting vehicles are planned to eliminate special incident situations that are unlikely to occur, but pose a great threat to human life, physical integrity or the property of the country and citizens, even in the short term. The article focuses also on these less frequent, more specialised firefighting vehicles and technical devices, with a description of their typical deployment conditions.
When drawing the conclusions, the ideas and solutions found during the international outlook worthy of Hungarian adaptation are presented. Here the national adaptation possibilities of each international, special firefighting vehicle, the advantages they can provide and the expected disadvantages are examined. The content of the article is a general summary that fills a gap due to the small amount of international literature, which can also be used during research, investigation and education in this research field.