Korea Forest Service Selects Wildfire Suppression Vehicle as Top Government Budget-Saving Case

Performance Matches That of High-Performance Foreign Wildfire Suppression Vehicles
Purchase and Maintenance Costs Are Only Half

The "multipurpose wildfire suppression vehicle" has been selected as the government's top case of budget savings. This vehicle has also been recognized for significantly enhancing wildfire suppression capabilities at large-scale wildfire sites during the spring season.

On June 20, the Korea Forest Service announced that the wildfire suppression vehicle was selected as the best case of "expenditure savings" by the Ministry of Economy and Finance's Budget Performance Incentive Review Committee for the first half of this year.

Domestic multipurpose wildfire suppression vehicle. Provided by the Korea Forest Service

Previously, the Korea Forest Service introduced high-performance foreign-made wildfire suppression vehicles on a trial basis in response to the large-scale wildfires that occurred in Uljin and Samcheok in 2022. This was based on the recognition of the need to introduce vehicles equipped with high-capacity water tanks that could effectively suppress wildfires in Korea's mountainous terrain.

However, foreign-made wildfire suppression vehicles were expensive and had high maintenance and management costs, which limited their widespread adoption and deployment in the field.

In response, the Korea Forest Service launched a research and development project using a living lab approach, involving wildfire suppression personnel, to localize wildfire suppression vehicles. By reflecting feedback from the field?such as ambulance functions, vehicle body protection through self-spraying, and water cannon capabilities?the agency completed the development of a domestic wildfire suppression vehicle in April last year.

The living lab is a model in which end users set the field as a laboratory, and companies and research institutions jointly carry out technology development and demonstration. This approach offers the advantage of actually incorporating the requirements needed in the field.

In particular, the domestically developed wildfire suppression vehicle matches the performance of foreign-made models but is available at half the purchase cost. The unit price per vehicle is 750 million won for foreign-made vehicles and 375 million won for domestic vehicles, meaning that two domestic vehicles can be purchased for the price of one foreign-made vehicle.

This achievement contributed positively to the vehicle being selected as the top case in the "expenditure savings" category of the recent budget performance incentive program led by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. As a result, six contributing public officials, including aerial wildfire suppression personnel, received a total of 35 million won in budget performance incentives.

Park Eunsik, Director General of the Forest Industry Policy Bureau at the Korea Forest Service, stated, "The development and deployment of wildfire suppression vehicles optimized for Korea's mountainous terrain, with the participation of field experts, has enabled innovation in ground-based wildfire suppression. The Korea Forest Service will strive to complete the localization of large-scale suppression vehicles within the next two years and establish a science and technology-based ground response system for large wildfires."