![]() ![]() The intense blast of water and air helps cut off the supply of oil to the flame, while also helping to suck huge amounts of heat out of the atmosphere and surrounding area. Oil blasting out of a wellhead is under pressure, and the primary flame is a good 15-30 feet clear in the air. The mechanism behind its firefighting power is simple. It was finished right around when Kuwait was desperate to extinguish hundreds of burning oil wells, and so was quickly deployed to the country via aerial transport. Each engine was then fitted with three water nozzles each, capable of delivering up to 220 gallons of water per second. In place of the original gun turret, it instead sported a pair of Tumansky R-25 turbojets, as used in the MiG-21 fighter jet and producing 27,000 pounds of thrust. Big Wind, as it came to be known, was built on the chassis of a Russian T-34 tank dating back to World War II. Credit: Getty Imagesĭecades later, in 1991, oil company MB Drilling was putting the finishing touches on an advanced version of its own design in a town some 50 miles southeast of Budapest. ![]() Big Wind on the ground in Kuwait, extinguishing a burning oil well. ![]() With a pair of water nozzles bolted up just above the jet exhaust, a powerful blast of water and air could be used to effectively fight large fires. This idea became popular in the Hungarian oil industry, particularly after one example was used to put out a fire at the 168 Algyo oil well in 1968. Decades before, the Soviets had experimented with fitting MiG-15 jet engines on the back of ZIL-131 trucks. In the face of this environmental disaster, however, a firefighting team from Hungary made a name for themselves out on the desert sands, astride a jet-engined tank named Big Wind.īig Wind was not the first of its kind, but a successful development of a concept first pioneered by the Soviet Union. Kuwaiti oil wells were set alight en masse, creating towering infernos that blackened the sky.Īs it turns out, extinguishing a burning oil well is no easy feat. As the Iraqi army retreated at the end of the first Gulf War, they took the term “scorched Earth policy” quite literally. ![]()
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