Two firefighters hospitalized after tanker truck crash in Ohio

A 3,000-gallon water tanker carrying volunteer firefighters to a reported house fire in Dresden overturned on a rural Muskingum County road, sending two crew members to the hospital and leaving one trapped in the wreck for 45 minutes to an hour.

The crash happened Thursday, May 7, 2026, near 910 Dresden-Adamsville Road on State Route 208 in Muskingum County, Ohio. Jeff Jadwin, director of the Muskingum County Emergency Management Agency, said the truck went off the right side of the road, returned to the pavement, flipped onto its side, then ran off the left side of the road and hit a tree.

The firefighters were responding to a house fire in Dresden where a person had been reported trapped inside. Jadwin said the people inside the house got out safely. The passenger was taken to Genesis Hospital in Zanesville, while the driver was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Columbus.

Local reports later described one firefighter as stable and the other as critical or serious. The driver remained pinned in the tanker until rescue crews cut the firefighter free. The truck itself was a heavy piece of apparatus, weighing about 25,000 pounds before the weight of the water in the tank is considered, and that load is part of what made the crash so severe.

Jadwin said he believed the tanker may have rolled after water shifted inside the truck as it came down a hill. That possibility points to a familiar danger for volunteer fire departments that answer urgent calls across rural terrain. Tankers are essential in places where hydrants are scarce, but they also require skill, speed and steady control on winding roads, especially when crews are racing toward a reported rescue.

The incident is a stark reminder of the strain on volunteer departments that must do heavy-duty work with limited margins for error. In this case, the house fire ended without casualties inside the building, but the emergency response itself left two firefighters injured and one still recovering in the aftermath of a violent rollover.