On today’s episode of Badass military vehicles we’ll be taking a look at the most powerful truck in the world popularly called The Big Wind.
This truck is so powerful that it can blow out burning oil wells like candles. This dystopian device was used to extinguish the Kuwait oil fires after the Iraqi invasion.
During the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the fleeing Iraqi Army sets off explosive charges at the tops of more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells in February 1991, exploding geysers of oil and throwing dazzling yellow flames as high as 300 feet into the air after gutting and pillaging Kuwait City. These flames was releasing up to 5000 tons of billowing black smoke every day into the barren desert environment for some 30 weeks, creating an apocalyptic, inky plume stretching 800 kilometers.
This is where the most powerful truck in the world came in.
Initially the tank was primarily designed to quell oil well fires in Hungary, coincidentally the Gulf war erupted almost immediately after its introduction, and Windy was soon drafted to quell the fire in Kuwait.
It was immediately flown to the blazing oil fields of Kuwait in C130 cargo plane along with a dispatch vehicle and three middle-aged fire fighters from Hungary. Within a week of intense fire fight, the blazing fire that lasted for over 30 weeks was put out by the most powerful truck in the world.
Read more on the use of the big wind to quell the blazing fire at the oil wells in Kuwait here.
When a group of Hungarian engineers set out to design a way to decontaminate old Cold War tanks, they unintentionally created the world’s most powerful fire engine. They called it “the Big Wind.”
The most powerful truck in the world uses an old T-34 tank and two MiG 21 jet engines. Once you see it in action, you’ll know why they call it the big wind.
This powerful machine isn’t designed to put out a typical building fire; in fact, it’s more likely to cause more damage to the structure than a fire would. The Big Wind specializes in putting out oil well fires that would otherwise be impossible to put out, requiring only that they “burn out.” The Big Wind can churn out 220 gallons of water per second using six nozzles, and that’s when things get interesting. The two jet engines are then fired up, and using a combination of a lot of water and even more wind, they simply blow it out.
If you miss our previous episode of Badass military vehicles, you can click on this link.
