Firefighting vehicles all seem to follow the same formula: big, red trucks that all looks the same. Jalopnik readers found ten blaze-extinguishing rigs that don't quite fit the mold.

Pretty much any vehicle can be called into firetruck duty, but what's the strangest one of all?

Nelson Cruz is from San Francisco de Macoris in the Dominican Republic, and his home town didn't have much in the way of a fire truck or ambulances. Until now. Cruz leveraged his athletic success to buy one for the town.

When a community scrapes together taxpayer dollars to buy a new fire truck, it reasonably expects to get one eventually. Such was not the case for communities that placed orders with Elite Fire Apparatus.

When Williamson County, Ill. firefighters saw one of their trucks overturned in a ditch, they feared that one of their compadres had gotten into a wreck and might have been hurt.

A Baltimore City Councilman wants to put advertisements on the city's fleet of fire trucks in order to ease their massive debt. Self-aggrandizing alternative ad agency People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (PETA) wants to help by buying the first round of ads. Of course, since it's PETA, there's a mostly…

A rescue crew responding to the Christmas Day flooding in a suburb of Melbourne misjudged the depth of flood waters and plowed straight in, nearly submerging their truck entirely. One firefighter has been "stood down" and the whole crew may end up suspended.

Everything that makes the Ford Raptor an awesome truck in civilian hands (go-anywhere off-road prowess, speed, truck capabilities) makes it even better when in the command of first-responders.

Next time someone calls for a Chinese fire drill, duck. China has a new weapon to fight skyscraper blazes, a fire truck topped with a gun that can squirt three tons of water per minute. Price? Under a half-mill.

Orville Douglas Denison spent his youth sketching out futuristic aircraft, but in retirement he's turned pragmatic. His "aerial fire truck," a cross between a conveyer belt and a ladder, could help firefighters quickly shuttle victims out of burning buildings.