Our engine holds 1200 gallons. It goes in first* and starts putting the wet stuff on the red stuff.

As the engine drives in it drops a 3" hose along its path. Next is our big tender with 3000 gallons. It stops at the street and connects to the dropped hose to pump more water up to the engine.

The tender also has a drop tank -- think about a portable kids' wading pool but much larger and deeper. Shuttle tenders refill the drop tank while our big tender draws from it to continue supplying the engine.

We don't have fire hydrants, so this is the dance we have to do.

* It's very important to park the engine close to the fire but not too close. Ask me how I learned this.

Wow. Those things could Dip Toontown off the face of the earth.

To say nothing of the launchpad sound suppression water system[1] that dumps 7,300 gal/sec (about 2–3 seconds for one swimming pool)!

Though that's just gravity-fed, of course. Still pretty cool though, I think (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_suppression_system

The type 55 "deltic" locomotives, named after army regiments used to do the east coast Edinburgh-London train run, there were 22 of them in service and one in the science museum London. They had the first 100mph rating for diesel passenger service.

The engine had a unique characteristic whine or whistle. As an avid train spotter at Waverley station in edinburgh I loved hearing it, saw every one and was in the cab of two thanks to long suffering kind engine drivers.

There was a mini deltic too. I'm not sure it went beyond a testbed loco.

Napier was on the cutting edge of certain kinds of IC engines for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Sabre (1938).

Powered the absolute monster that was the Tempest (up to the Mk 2 - they did have reliability issues they never quite solved but 3000+HP out of an engine that weighs barely more than a tonne dry will do that)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Tempest

Was happy to see the name re-used for our upcoming fighter.

We also called the Eurofighter the Typhoon and the (WW2) Typhoon (also a Sabre engine) was the predecessor of the Tempest - it started as a re-wing of the Typhoon but enough changes where made to give it a new name.

Just a devastating superprop in its day.

Piston engines got pretty wild before turbines eventually took over the world. The most efficient ones were more efficient than today's turbines in terms of BSFC[0]. One of the most interesting to me was the Napier Nomad[1], which used turbo- and super-charging. However, the turbo had secondary fuel injection and effectively ran as a turbine to drive the compressor.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-specific_fuel_consumptio... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Nomad

They're unique. Originally designed to power fast torpedo boats during WW2, three of these powerful and compact engines would churn out plenty of power for the boat up to 50 kt.

https://everythingaboutboats.org/napier-deltic/

> The Napier Deltic engine is a British opposed-piston valveless, supercharged uniflow scavenged, two-stroke diesel engine

Any tech that includes the word “scavenged” must be cool and efficient

Think about all the processes they just didn't have to do back then.

FDNY reintroduced the "Super Pumper" concept in a somewhat different form a few years ago.

See:

https://www.firefighternation.com/lifestyle/new-fdny-super-p...

The article says the "super pumper" could supply 8,800 gallons per minute, and it came with three "satellite trucks [...] not burdened with a pump of their own"

Your basic modern fire pump unit can pump 2,200 gallons per minute (if you can find a water source that'll give you that much) and it'd typically have a crew of 4-5 firefighters on board.

So you'd probably replace it with 4 regular fire trucks? Then you've got just as much pump capacity, plus you've got the flexibility to send the trucks to different places.

Some interesting history here: https://www.firerescue1.com/firefighting-history/articles/th...

Better building fire suppression systems. Not to mention improvements to flame retardant materials.

The article mentions that the main pumping unit could draw water from 8 hydrants at once. So 7000 ft of total hose to get to 8 hydrants sounds like it makes sense.

I wonder if maybe it can't even use hydrants that are too near each other in the plumbing graph.

If they were all in a single line it probably wouldn't have worked -- series hydrodynamic hose impedance adds just like series resistance in a circuit and the pressure at the end would have been too low to be useful. But if it was 7000 feet arranged in several shorter parallel lines it's possible.

It could draw from 8 hydrants. So average of 900 feet in that case.

Which still seems like a lot, but not so incredible.

Tangentially related and recommended. Werner Herzog's film that also features longer sections on the fire fighting efforts on the oil fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness

You could also nuke it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field

That's a bit outside my wheelhouse, but in regards to firefighting specifically there is another such distinction that comes up, and that is in regards to pumps that are designed to regularly pump seawater, versus pumps that primarily pump freshwater. The difference is mainly in the materials used for building the pump, and relate to the corrosive effects of seawater. You can pump seawater with a "normal" fire pump, but if you do it's imperative to flush the pump (and other hose and appliances) thoroughly with freshwater as soon as possible to avoid damage. The seawater rated pumps, on the other hand, can handle seawater all the time. As you can probably guess, the primary application of seawater rated pumps is for fireboats or onboard firefighting on other sorts of ships.

Those are pretty extreme applications that require extremely specific pumps. You are very firmly in the "call for pricing" territory

You're thinking of temperature and viscosity parameters.

Read the data sheets and look for those terms, or look for manufacturers of pumps that maximize both.

torque is the more important figure. Which is why 13l truck engines output only about 600hp at most.

This thing feels like a mortal danger to the (up to 8x!) iron pipes / hydrants it's pulling from,

When pumping a fire engine supplied by a hydrant (or any other pressurized source, as opposed to drafting from a static water source like a pond or lake) there's an idea of "residual pressure" which is monitored by a gauge on the pump panel. The engineer is responsible for making sure the residual pressure doesn't drop below the level where damage would occur to the water system, supply hose, or the pump itself. It's been a few years, but I think most departments spec somewhere around 20psi as the minimum residual pressure they allow.

Also wondering: what replaced this!

The Super Pumper[1], of course! :-)

The new one isn't quite as extreme, not tractor drawn and no separate engine. This is more of a traditional fire engine style platform, but the specs are still pretty impressive.

[1]: https://www.firefighternation.com/lifestyle/new-fdny-super-p...

> Also wondering: what replaced this!

A collection of smaller pumps and monitors, which is likely a better scheme, in terms of flexibility and fault tolerance. While a remarkable design, the single pump with long hoses to multiple hydrants, then radiating to multiple monitors, is a system that takes great coordination and precious time to deploy and rework in action.

The Napier Deltic engine is the party piece in all this. It is an ambitious and yet successful design, intended to push the limit of power-to-weight in a diesel engine. I investigated the state of current diesel locomotive engines in comparison to the Deltic and it remains, to this day, the highest power-to-weight diesel engine in use for locomotives. (There are half a dozen still running in the UK today in limited service.) I've personally visited the Bay City museum to see this engine.

These engines require forced induction; they cannot run naturally aspirated. In its various naval, rail and other applications there were many different induction designs applied to the Deltic: turbos, superchargers and combinations of both. Today, we have electric forced induction, enabled by the high performance electric motors that have emerged elsewhere in transport applications. One thinks of what diesel wonders might be created by combining the Deltic design with electric forced induction.

I imagine the hydrants were operated at positive pressure. Water mains are generally somewhere between 40 and maybe 120 psi gauge. You don’t gain a whole lot by sucking on them - at most you get to -14 psi, and you do not want to boil the water (aka cause cavitation) in your pump.