THE DEFINITIVE TRUCKING SITE

April 2009

Fires blaze on the hills behind the home of a Stellenbosch resident.

Could one truck have minimised the effects of the fires that ravaged the Western Cape? The Mercedes-Benz Unimog - a go anywhere, do anything truck - is back in South Africa having been launched at last year’s Johannesburg International Motor Show. So could it have turned the tables on the fire damage? It seems the answer is yes, reports Richard Macaskill. 

In the past few months, raging fires have terrorised the Western Cape landscape with some saying they are the worst the Western Cape has seen in a decade. Many residents lost their homes and at the time of writing, a state of anxiousness still reigned. But could one truck have calmed the situation at all? 

The Mercedes-Benz Unimog is a tough piece of machinery and when it has the fire truck conversion done, it is almost unstoppable. “In my opinion, there is no better vehicle for fire fighting,” says Lizaan Morta, manager of fire services at the Stellenbosch Fire department.” 

Trevor Fiford, managing director of Fire Raiders, a company that kits out the Unimog as a fire truck, agrees and says “it is unsurpassed as a fire fighting vehicle.” 

Fire Raiders takes the standard Unimog chassis cab and adds compartments for water and foam, as well as a variety of powerful pumps. Equipment compartments are also added and the seating in the crew cab is reinforced to ensure that the Unimog really is as unstoppable as it looks. 

According to both Morta and Fiford, the biggest problem with fighting wild fires is accessibility,  or rather the lack thereof. Many conventional fire trucks cannot get close enough to the source of the fire to distinguish it. “They have to build a fire break and wait for the fire to come to them,” notes Fiford. 

This has been one of the major problems with this year’s fires in the Western Cape with the fire fighters having to wait until the fires reached the roads to douse the flames. According to Morta, the Stellenbosch fire department has only one  Unimog but it has most certainly been of great use to them. 

“I would love to have four or five more Unimogs,” says Morta. However, it is not always that simple. The fire departments will put out a tender for a certain number of vehicles with certain requirements and specifications, whether they be on or off-road vehicles. Whoever can meet these requirements at the best price is given the tender. This becomes an issue because, while Unimogs are highly effective vehicles, they are also extremely expensive. 

The firefighting Unimog rolling in at around R2,5 million fully kitted out, but the premium choice for firefighting.

A fully kitted-out Unimog fire truck would set the buyer back R2.5 million. According to Fiford, one of the reasons that more Unimogs are not in use as fire fighting vehicles is a lack of awareness of what it can actually do. When it was in use in the 1980s it was hugely popular but the majority of fire departments are made up of very few people from this era. The Unimog needs to re-entrench itself in the market. However, Fiford has faith that it will easily do this and comments that “in four or five years it’s going to be the premium fire fighting vehicle.” 

In any case, R2.5 million is cheap in comparison with the three unused submarines South Africa has sitting around. So until we can find a way to fill those with water and drop them on top of the fires, the Unimog certainly seems the more sensible option. 

The Western Cape has always been a particularly fire-prone area, so the question must be asked: Why were the fire brigades not better prepared to handle the effects of such severe fires? “We were prepared,” comments Morta, “but the problem is that in previous years the fires were closer to the roads, whereas this year they started up in the mountains and came down to us.” Morta adds once again that the issue of accessibility is a problem when it comes to fighting fires in the mountains. 

A Unimog, or rather, more Unimogs, would have been of great use in such situations as they could have gone into the mountains and fought the fires far more effectively closer to the source. The fires would have been both less serious and shorter lasting. 

“These fires are the worst we’ve seen in a number of years,” notes Morta. However, despite the severity of the fires, residents of the Western Cape have been extremely lucky to date, experiencing minimal damage to property in comparison with previous years. 

It is absolutely crucial, however, that more effective fire fighting vehicles are used in fire departments around the country but specifically in areas such as the Western Cape, where fires are a perennial problem. Expensive they may be, but if this year’s Western Cape fires can provide any kind of illustration, it is clear that buying a Unimog is a small price to pay to be able to turn around or prevent a situation that could cost many more millions of Rands worth of damage, as well as the potentially far more serious human cost that could occur. 

“Now that the Unimog has come back into South Africa, we will see far less serious effects of wild land fires,” notes Fiford. 

Clearly, praise for the Unimog is as interminable as the vehicle itself and we can only hope that more Unimogs will be added to the fleets of various fire departments before the dangerous summer fire season hits again next year.