Sony introduced the first Walkman in 1979. The Bee Gees cleaned house at the Grammy Awards that year, and reached the top of the Canadian hit charts on four separate occasions. Joe Clark became the youngest prime minister in Canadian history, though his minority government would prove short-lived.
The Walkman, the Bee Gees and Joe Clark have all come and gone. Each has even undergone a resurgence of sorts (
cassettes are making a comeback).
But here's something from 1979 that never went away: it's a three-axle Chevrolet tanker truck still called upon to help workers with the P.E.I. forestry department put out forest fires.
The '79 Chevy is the oldest of a fleet of six vehicles with an average age of 30. That's old enough to qualify as an antique under P.E.I.'s Highway Traffic Act.
The newest truck in P.E.I.'s forest-fire fleet is a 1991 model. The other four trucks date from the 1980s. Most of the vehicles are four-wheel drive tanker trucks, designed to be able to go places conventional fire trucks can't. According to officials, they're called upon an average of about 25 times a year.
Resources down
"When you have a very significant forest fire, the struggle comes when you have equipment that is broken down," said Dan MacAskill, who served as head of P.E.I.'s forest fire protection until retiring in 2013.
"You have a higher probability of breakdown in an older vehicle. So your resources you have available to fight a fire, they're simply down. You don't have them."
MacAskill says there were equipment breakdowns while he was still in the service, which required dispatching another piece of equipment from another part of the province.
He says he began advocating for new trucks in 1998, and he's still advocating in retirement, making a presentation this spring to the minister of finance during annual pre-budget consultations.
"Almost 50 per cent of the province is in woodland," he says, outlining the need for updated firefighting equipment.