THE DRY HYDRANT, right, pumps water into the Smith Township Fire Truck, which is shooting it out the other side as a test run Wednesday morning. The hydrant can pump 1,000 gallons per minute.

WARNOCK — There are many remote areas of Belmont County where fire hydrants aren’t always accessible as quickly as fire departments may need one in case of an emergency.

Since its inception in 1997, the Belmont County Tanker Task Force has been doing its part to help water become more readily available, and it’s in the process of taking another step in that direction. Through a 50-50 grant program, via the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, the task force secured a total of 17 dry hydrants, which are being mounted on overpasses and bridges above streams that won’t go dry throughout the year.

“We’re trying to put them throughout the county mainly where we think it’s a necessity for them,” Belmont County Tanker Task Force Co-Coordinator Jim Delman said. “It’s not necessarily for areas without hydrants, but in areas where we’re able to get enough water to use the tanker system and we don’t have to use the hydrant system.”

Thus far, nine of the devices have been installed and are fully functional. Delman has been involved with the installation, too. How the weather cooperates over the coming weekends will determine when the remaining dry hydrants are installed.

“We’re hoping to have them all (installed) within the next month,” Delman said. “Now that we know what we’re doing and have all the brackets made, we can put up about three in a day.”

Smith Township Volunteer Fire Department, which has its station in Centerville, has three of the new hydrants and all are installed and functional. Smith Township has two in Warnock and one on Glencoe Road.

“This system is really beneficial because a lot of times this gives us additional fill sites because there isn’t always enough water off of the county’s pressurized system to supply water fast enough to fill the trucks,” Smith Township VFD Chief John Phillips said. “Sometimes we’ve had to travel up to 5 miles or more to get water supply, so these (hydrants) allow us to close that gap.”

The hydrants are highly efficient, pumping upwards of 1,000 gallons of water a minute into the tankers. It takes just a few minutes to prepare a dry hydrant for the process of loading the tankers.

“They’re dropped into the water and then we can draft the water out of the creeks,” Phillips said.

Through a contact on the Ohio Fire Chiefs Association Water Supply Technical Committee, Delman originally saw a dry fire hydrant in southeast Ohio in Logan County.

“Jeremy Keller is a member of the committee and he installed one as a demo unit and we saw it,” Delman said.

From there, the Belmont County group began the process of writing the grant.

As of now, Belmont County is one of just three of Ohio’s 88 counties to be utilizing the system.