Hungarian engineers once put two jet engines on a tank and called it a fire truck
Oil well fires are terrible disasters, and much more difficult to extinguish. As the well burns, it continuously pumps large volumes of highly flammable oil to the surface. But Hungarian engineers came up with a brilliant solution even for this catastrophe.
These fires aren’t just extremely dangerous—they also cause enormous financial damage and severe environmental pollution. Traditional methods, such as injecting vast quantities of seawater directly to the base of the well, while effective, tend to be slow and prohibitively expensive.
During the 1991 Gulf War, as Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait, they set fire to an estimated 600 oil wells in an effort to cripple the country’s oil industry, according to IFLScience. The resulting infernos created widespread devastation and toxic smoke plumes that conventional firefighting tactics struggled to contain.
It was in this critical moment that the Big Wind entered the scene—a remarkable machine designed and built by Hungarian engineers. The Big Wind is a firetruck mounted on a 42-ton tank chassis, outfitted with two MiG-21 jet engines. As Earthly Mission reports, the base of the machine was a Soviet-era T-34 tank stripped of its cannon to make room for the two three-meter-long jet engines.
The Big Wind operates by combining the powerful airflow generated by the jet engines with water vapor dispersion. It could blast up to 830 liters of water per minute into the blaze, propelled by air currents approaching the speed of sound. This combination rapidly smothered flames by depriving them of oxygen and cooling the oil, effectively breaking the chain reaction of combustion.
The machine required a crew of three: a driver to maneuver the tank, a controller to regulate the water jets, and a fire commander directing operations from outside. Interestingly, the Big Wind had an early prototype dating back to 1968 in the Soviet Union, which combined a MiG-15 jet engine with a ZIL truck, and was used to extinguish a major oil fire near Algyő, Hungary.
Building on this concept, the Hungarian company further refined the machine, resulting in the apocalyptic-looking fire suppression vehicle that would ultimately be deployed in Kuwait to tackle towering infernos.
The Big Wind stands as an iconic example of Hungarian engineering ingenuity. While such machines never became widespread in modern times, the Big Wind proved its effectiveness and remained in service until November 1991, when the last Kuwaiti oil well fire was finally extinguished.
Though now more of a historical curiosity, the Big Wind lives on in the collective memory of fire and disaster response professionals as a symbol of bold, inventive problem-solving.
So the Big Wind was not only a marvel of engineering creativity but also a life-saving innovation in the face of one of history’s most devastating oil field disasters. Thanks to the innovation and courage of its Hungarian creators, even the fiercest flames—fueled by hundreds of wells across a nation—could be brought under control.
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