The Warren County Fiscal Court has formally approved the purchase of a building near the Bowling Green-Warren County regional airport to serve as a new emergency operations center for the region.
The nearly $2 million purchase includes 2.52 acres of property on Airway Court, featuring a 7,000 square-foot warehouse-style building with 40,000 square-feet of fenced outdoor storage space.
Warren County emergency management director Ronnie Pearson said the search for a permanent emergency operations center began in the wake of the devastation caused by tornadoes in 2021. Following the disaster, Warren County applied for, and was awarded, a hazard mitigation grant offered by the state of Kentucky, prompting a roughly three year search for the right location.
“We looked throughout the city and the county for a place that would suffice as a center for actions and should a large-scale disaster occur, there’s a lot of things that happen in and around the airport. So, that’s the reason we chose this particular piece of property. It was a little long and lengthy in getting an agreement and a purchase, but that is now completed,” Pearson said.
Pearson said the center’s location on Airway Court places it in an optimal position to assist with disasters statewide, as well as making large-scale evacuations and potential supply drops more streamlined.
“On a larger scale, this emergency operations center can also support the state of Kentucky, such as the New Madrid fault, should it go off. Severe flooding that happens to the west, where we have large numbers of individuals that need to be evacuated and/or receive medical treatment. And Bowling Green has been long chosen as a site for those operations to happen, and that would include a lot of air traffic that is going to be landing at the airport anyway,” Pearson said.
In addition to the grant funding to purchase the property, the county also received roughly $3 million to renovate and upgrade the site to create a state of the art emergency operations center.
“Number one, it’s going to meet ‘Safe Room’ capabilities. That means it’s going to be built to a standard that it’ll withstand a 250 mile-per-hour wind. It would be a shelter should we go under a tornado warning, that’s the main upgrade of the facility, along with a room for central operations, weather monitoring, video monitoring of the conditions in and around Warren County is going to be the main thing,” Pearson said.
Pearson expects that once the facility is built, additional emergency response teams on the state and federal level will likely house offices and personnel at the emergency operations center.
“We’re in discussions with several local, state and federal agencies to see if they have a need to come on board if they would like to, so we can literally work together to accomplish the main task of protecting our citizens,” he said.
For severe weather events in the past, emergency operations have created temporary headquarters locations throughout the county. When a multi-day rainstorm caused statewide flooding in early April, one of those temporary sites was set up at the former Charles M. Moore insurance building. While those temporary sites are helpful, Pearson said a permanent location will give emergency responders and the public an increased level of response and resiliency.
“In the 28 years I’ve been here, we’ve utilized a few borrowed locations, and this will give us a permanent home to train and educate our responders, the public, local officials on how to better deal with disasters and be able to provide just that much better service to the citizens,” Pearson said.
Bids for contractors to complete renovations on the site are out now, with the expectation that offices will move into the new space in early 2026.
