Author: Vitali Charapovich

We started with pumps

Long before RAMFAN became known around the world for firefighting ventilation, Euramco’s engineering story began with water.

Our roots go back to RAM Centrifugal Products in San Diego in the 1960s, supporting U.S. Navy ships with the repair, reverse engineering and manufacture of pumps, steam turbines and other complex rotating machinery.

Much of that work existed because the original machinery was obsolete or its manufacturer could no longer support it. Keeping a naval vessel operational meant understanding how the machine actually worked – hydraulics, fluid dynamics, metallurgy, machining, bearings, seals, tolerances – and then engineering a reliable solution.

Failure wasn’t particularly interested in the age of the drawing or whether the original supplier still existed.

That engineering foundation eventually took us somewhere unexpected: from moving water to moving air.

In the 1980s, Euramco applied its rotating-machinery experience to a water-turbine-driven axial fan for U.S. Navy shipboard damage control. That path eventually grew into RAMFAN structural PPV, confined-space ventilation, hazardous-area ATEX and IECEx equipment, variable-speed DC drives and increasingly sophisticated purpose-built electric motors.

Then came batteries, motor controllers, chargers and power electronics.

Kraken Power grew from those capabilities into onboard and deployable energy storage and conversion systems.

PRO//connect added CAN-based controls, Bluetooth, remote diagnostics, IoT connectivity and fleet visibility.

And eventually we found ourselves looking back at where the whole journey had started.

Pumps.

NOMAD is not Euramco wandering into a fashionable new market.

It is Euramco returning to its roots.

Follow the risk before the revenue

That belief will increasingly influence how we run the company.

We intend to look beyond yesterday’s pump sales and yesterday’s political market boundaries.

Over time, macro climate indicators, satellite observations, vegetation conditions, drought data, fire history and other geographic information should help influence where we develop dealer capability, where we position inventory, what products we prioritize and what applications our engineers should be solving next.

That distinction matters.

A region with little historical demand may become strategically important before its procurement system recognizes the change. A product optimized around North American wildland practices may not be the right product for Australia, the Mediterranean, the Alps or emerging fire environments farther north in Europe.

Our ambition is to understand those differences – and build accordingly.

Petrol. Diesel. Electric. Whatever solves the problem best.

We also don’t believe the future of pumping is simply replacing every combustion engine with a battery.

Electric drive can provide remarkable advantages: instant torque, precise speed and pressure control, lower noise and vibration, reduced routine maintenance and entirely new possibilities for vehicle integration.

But those advantages matter only when the complete system works in the environment where firefighters actually operate.

Australian bushfire conditions can exceed 55°C ambient temperature, with direct sunlight, dust and sustained high-load operation. That’s why, for example, our 10 kW P5e architecture uses liquid cooling for its electric drive and energy system rather than assuming an electric motor is automatically the better solution simply because it is electric.

Where a Honda petrol engine is the right answer, we’ll use one.

Where Kubota or Yanmar diesel power makes sense, we’ll use it.

And where electric drive materially improves the mission, Euramco brings something relatively unusual to the pump industry: decades of internal experience developing motors, motor controllers, rugged lithium battery systems, power electronics and connected controls.

That capability gives NOMAD room to explore where firefighting pumping goes next rather than simply reproducing where it has already been.

And about that logo…

If the NOMAD logo looks slightly different from the usual fire-equipment corporate identity, that’s intentional too.

I designed it with a little inspiration from the Parental Advisory stickers plastered across punk, alternative and hip-hop CDs when I was growing up in the 1990s.

Partly because I liked the graphic.

Partly because NOMAD should have a little attitude.

And partly as a small design-level protest against where a lot of industrial manufacturing has gone.

Euramco remains a family-owned manufacturing company, now in its third generation of leadership.

The fire industry, meanwhile, has experienced decades of consolidation. Many historic manufacturers and brands now sit inside increasingly large corporate and private-equity-owned groups.

There is nothing inherently wrong with scale or institutional ownership.

But we’re comfortable choosing another path.

We like engineers arguing about a casting.

We like people worrying about whether a seal will survive ten years from now.

We like having inventory available when a customer actually needs it.

We like developing products because we believe they should exist.

And we hope – although you never really know – that nobody around our table someday decides reducing production capacity and inventory would make the next quarterly report look a little nicer.

The logo is our small reminder of that.

Independent. Specialized. Slightly stubborn.

That’s probably a reasonable description of NOMAD too.

El Niño has returned

The tropical Pacific transitioned into El Niño conditions during 2026, and current outlooks indicate that the event may strengthen through the coming months.

For Australia, El Niño has historically been associated with reduced winter and spring rainfall across parts of eastern and southern Australia, warmer temperatures and, in some regions, increased fire weather.

But El Niño is not a bushfire forecast.

Australia’s weather is influenced by multiple interacting oceanic and atmospheric systems, and even a strong El Niño does not necessarily produce proportionally strong effects everywhere on the continent.

What matters more immediately is what those climate signals eventually produce on the ground: rainfall, temperature, soil moisture, vegetation condition and available surface water.

Because bushfire preparedness is not determined by the name we give an ocean cycle.

It is determined by conditions on the ground.

What can Australia learn from the north?

Perhaps the most useful lesson from the Northern Hemisphere in 2026 isn’t whether Australia will experience the same summer.

It is what happens when large areas become operationally demanding at the same time.

When numerous fires compete for crews, aircraft, appliances and specialist resources, suppression becomes a capacity problem.

That is already visible internationally this year.

And it raises a basic preparedness question for every fire agency, brigade and land manager:

For NOMAD, one part of that question deserves particular attention:

water.

• Where is it?
• How quickly can we access it?
• How far can we move it?
• What elevation must it overcome?
• What pressure remains after hundreds of metres of hose?
• Can a static water source support an operation away from an appliance?
• Can additional pumps extend that system farther into the fireground?
• And can the equipment required to do it remain operational after weeks or months of hard seasonal use?

These aren’t questions to begin asking when smoke appears on the horizon.

Back to where we started

NOMAD is a new name. The company behind it is not.

NOMAD Pumps is part of Euramco Group, a family-owned engineering and manufacturing business now in its third generation of family leadership.

Our story began more than sixty years ago with water.

In the 1960s, the company built pumps and steam turbines for ships of the United States Navy. It was demanding work for a demanding customer–equipment engineered and manufactured for environments where reliability, quality and craftsmanship were not marketing claims, but requirements.

Over the generations that followed, Euramco’s engineering moved increasingly into air movement. Under the RAMFAN brand, we developed specialised ventilation equipment for fire, rescue, defence and hazardous industrial applications around the world.

That work eventually brought us to Australia.

Since the 1990s, Australian defence and fire-service users have operated RAMFAN equipment ranging from naval shipboard damage-control ventilators to positive-pressure ventilation blowers and hazardous-area confined-space fans.

For more than a decade, Fire Rescue Safety Australia (FRSA) has been our partner in supporting that equipment and the people who depend on it.

Now, more than sixty years after our family first started building pumps for naval ships, we’re coming back to where we began.

Water.

The challenge is different.

Instead of moving water aboard ships, NOMAD is focused on moving it through forests, across steep country, from dams and static supplies, along extended hose lays and into places where conventional vehicle-based water systems cannot easily reach.

But much of the engineering philosophy remains the same.

Build equipment for difficult environments.
Make it dependable.
Make it serviceable.
Understand the people who have to use it.

And never forget that when emergency equipment is finally needed, reliability isn’t an abstract specification.

For us, NOMAD is less a departure into a new category than a return to our roots–applying three generations of experience to a new water-moving challenge.

Watching the season

Nobody knows precisely what the Australian summer of 2026–27 will bring.

The extraordinary Northern Hemisphere summer unfolding today does not mean Australia will experience a symmetrical one several months later.

But neither should it be ignored.

El Niño is strengthening. Parts of Australia carry existing moisture deficits. Current outlooks point toward warmer conditions and reduced rainfall across important parts of the continent. Meanwhile, Australian firefighters are already gaining first-hand experience supporting major incidents in the Northern Hemisphere.

Those are signals.

Preparedness means paying attention to them before they become operational problems.

Our philosophy is simple: