Think your city’s traffic is bad? Dubai is likely worse. The rapidly expanding city has some of the worst traffic in the world, and that can be a particular problem when vehicles catch on fire, especially on bridges. So, to solve this admittedly overly specific problem, Dubai has rolled out a new fire suppression system that involves a jetpack firefighter, who is sadly not Rob Lowe.
Well, in a manner of speaking. As you can see in the above video, the system is a two-part jetski and water-jet platform. The idea is that if there’s a fire on the bridge, a firefighter roars out to it, equips the waterjet platform to elevate him to the level of the bridge, and then uses water to douse the fire. True, this is perhaps an overly engineered solution to a burning car on a bridge but it does have the virtue of being incredibly cool, and letting some lucky civil defense employee put “jetpack firefighter” on his business card. Imagine having that card in your pocket.
One hopes, of course, that we won’t see this in action, but car fires aren’t uncommon. In the US alone, there are 31 vehicle fires a day and one person is killed in each. So hopefully the jetpack firefighter can deal with this problems fast.
(via The Guardian)