A regular fire truck that fights blazes in the U.S. is about 30 feet long and weighs around 20 tons. That’s massive, no doubt, but it’s dwarfed by firetrucks that patrol your local airport. In some cases, they weigh more than double that. Those two are both put to shame by the world’s biggest firetruck, however, which entered service in the 1970s and was designed to fight deadly fires on military bases.
Called the Oshkosh P-15, this enormous firetruck was developed to fight airplane fires on military bases back in the late 1970s. It measures about 45 feet long, 10 feet wide and more than 13 feet tall, making it more than one and a half times the size of your friendly neighborhood firetruck.
Unladen, the truck clocks in at 65 tons, but within its enormous frame can carry up to 6,100 gallons of water with which to fight fires. In order to haul all that weight around, the firetruck is powered by not one, but two V8 diesel engines from American manufacturer Detroit Diesel. Each motor produces 495 HP to power the truck and its firefighting kit.
All that power was essential as, on top of hauling around the truck’s huge frame, the V8s power two massive water pumps. At each end of the enormous truck is a 1,250-gallon-per-minute pump that blasts water up to a rotating turret that’s fitted with a cannon to direct water to whatever plane is on fire that day.
Those turrets are enough to discharge a whole lot of firefighting liquid. In fact, Oshkosh explained in a blog post that the truck could haul around 6,000 gallons of water that could be mixed with foam concentrate meaning that the P-15 could “discharge 60,000 gallons of extinguishing foam” in one go.
With its enormous size and firefighting guns at each end, the P-15 is basically an enormous firefighting tank. The gargantuan fire trucks made it into service back in 1977 and found a home at military bases on both sides of the Atlantic, proving that it’s not just America that believes bigger is better.
In fact, a P-15 fire truck remained in the fleet at an airport in Iceland well into the early 2000s after more than 30 years in service. Now, most of the enormous firetrucks can be found abandoned in, presumably quite large, scrap yards where YouTubers like Mr Hewes get to play with them.
Oshkosh wasn’t a one-hit wonder with this behemoth and is still a big name in the airport fire engine business. Now based in Wisconsin, the company’s latest model is called the Striker and it’s about the same size as a domestic firetruck but can be powered by electric power or diesel.
Electric firetrucks aren’t reserved for airports, however, and firefighters in California took delivery of America’s first electric firetruck back in 2022.