Marine maintenance department in Kuwait fire service directorate is accountable to perform and organize maintenance activities to guarantee that the fire and rescue vessels are in duty and reliable. To relieve operational failures, critical equipment must be specified and prioritized. In this paper, an application case study is presented to prioritize failure modes of equipment of fire and rescue vessels according to their criticality using MCDM. A set of evaluation criteria is proposed includes equipment function, service experience, obsolescence, and failure-associated risk. Each one of these criteria has the associated set of sub-criteria. Failures with high critical scores are recognized and assigned to preventive maintenance. The information of various vessel equipment is extracted from records of the maintenance department to illustrate the model.