Fire Engines Photos

Good to see this brigade using both UHP for hose reel applications at small fires and CAFS for hand lines at more serious incidents. Both utilize available water supplies much more efficiently, resulting in much more rapid knockdown, less stress on firefighting personnel, reduced exposure to danger and much lower levels of water damage. Boston's original experimental CAFS engine never needed to connect to a hydrant at any of the incidents it attended, using tank water only! Brigades with CAFs equipped pumps in the Netherlands, Germany and - more recently - France also report they now use hydrant water very rarely too.

In US comparison tests, UHP extinguished a fire in 35 seconds delivering only 50 liters of water at a rate of 90 LPM at 100 AT. The exact same fire took over 70 seconds to be extinguished by a handline operating at 8 AT and delivering 550 LPM, which needed 685 liters of water. Now that UK brigades are increasingly employing TRVs, it seems likely that UHP installations on these units will soon become a "force multiplier" in terms of the kinds of incidents they can handle.

Added by Rob Johnson on 14 November 2020.

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