The celebration on Saturday will be from 11 a.m., when DJ music will start, to 6 p.m. at the firehouse at 6 E. Ogden St. At 1 p.m., the fire equipment parade will begin. The parade will be a history lesson of fire equipment as it developed and improved in the past century. The rain date is Sunday.

Rangers firefighter Michael Zangari is an event organizer and chairman of the planning committee.

“The parade will be lined up by the year of the fire apparatus with the Model T leading the way,” Zangari said. “The Model T is running and it’s been touched up, so it will be ready.”

As the trucks pass the Rangers firehouse, each one will be announced by Ashland Fire Chief Philip Groody. There will be monetary prizes.

About the truck, Zangari said, “It’s called a chemical truck and was the precursor to foam. There are two tanks on the back. The Model T was in service from 1916 to 1927. In 1927, the company purchased a Dodge fire engine. The chemical they used was very similar to a dry chemical fire extinguisher.”

“The Model T replaced our first fire truck, which was a horse-drawn hose cart bought from the West End Fire Station 7 in Pottsville,” he said. “When the fire company had the hose cart, the company opted to purchase the Model T, which was state of the art.”

The truck was housed at the fire company until 2000, when it became part of the Schuylkill County Historical Fire Society museum in Shenandoah. Just as with many of the historical trucks at the museum, the Model T remains the property of the fire company.

“It is the second oldest motorized fire company-owned truck on the east coast,” Zangari said. “And it is the oldest company-owned truck in Schuylkill County.”

The truck was last driven in the second annual Girardville St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2004. It has been refurbished twice, the last time in the 1970s.

After receiving emergency medical treatment from the firefighters at the Getty Avenue station, the driver was transported to nearby St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center. No firefighters were injured.

At about 2:45 p.m. firefighters had positioned a fire truck on Getty Avenue, an industrial area, to back it into the rear of the firehouse to do training exercises, Henderson said. Firefighters had stopped traffic and were about to back in when all of a sudden the car hit the back of the truck, sending the car flying in a diagonal direction into the brick firehouse, he said. The car hit the side of the entrance to one of the building’s bays, taking a chunk out of the brick there.  

The car, which sustained substantial damage to its front end, was towed away.

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.