WQXE NEWS

Warm Blessings Community Kitchen invites area residents to support neighbors experiencing hunger and housing instability by participating in their upcoming event Cardboard Nation: One Night Outside.

“We’ll have time of reflection, and we’ll also have time where teams can gather together and work on signage to continue to raise awareness for neighbors who are facing housing instability, and then we’ll have a morning gathering where we will get together and share some of the things that we learned during our time outdoors,” said Warm Blessings Executive Director Josh Miller.

The event will be held at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College on Friday, October 16, with participants having access to restrooms and the ECTC site offering added security for the overnight sleep-out.

“Folks can go to our website, www.warmblessings.org, and sign yourself up or your team,” Miller said.

The Cardboard Nation event is driven by participant fundraising, with all funds raised supporting Warm Blessings’s daily operations and programming. Contact the organization for more information at 270-763-9276.

Work is set to begin Tuesday on road work in Hardin County made possible by a grant opportunity through the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet’s Division of Waste Management.

“Our Road Department Supervisor Michael Steck applied for this grant, and it’s a test that lasts five years where you compare standard asphalt against a rubber-modified asphalt,” said Hardin County Government Communications Officer Brian Walker.

The county will be installing the rubber-modified asphalt on a one-mile stretch of Springfield Road, beginning at the intersection of Springfield and Valley Creek roads, and will then pave a one-mile stretch of traditional asphalt at the end of the rubberized section.

“This will be put through the same testing and quality standards over the next five years to see which one wears better, the overall need to make repairs, and what have you,” Walker said.

The county received about $162,000 through the grant, with the county contributing about $86,000 for the traditional asphalt portion.

“Putting them in the exact same place with the exact same amount of traffic and the exact weather, it’s going to give you a better comparison than say ‘here’s one in our county and here’s one three counties away, and what did they see?’” Walker said. “This gives us a real day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year accounting of how this is done.”

Work is expected to take three to five days, weather permitting. Springfield Road will remain open during the work, but local traffic should expect some delays.

Emergency crews responded to the second fire in four months at an auto and scrap metal recycling business in Radcliff Monday.

“We were dispatched at 12:24 p.m. to Edwards Recycling at 2525 South Dixie Boulevard, Radcliff, for a trash fire that they reported in their yard,” said Captain Benjamin Green with the Radcliff Fire Department. “Our unit arrived on the scene approximately a minute and a half later and found a heavy fire in some recycling material and old crushed up cars. We began a fire attack and knocked it down pretty quickly. We were on the scene for approximately one hour, and used approximately 6,000 gallons of water.”

Green said no injuries were reported among first responders or workers on property at the time of the fire. He said first responders were preparing to close both sides of Dixie Boulevard for fire response, but it was deemed unnecessary.

“At first we thought we were going to lay a line from the hydrant in front of 84 Lumber, like we did back, I think it was May 12 when we had the previous fire at that location, but due to the size of this one, it wasn’t as large as that one in May, so we did not have to do that,” Green said.

The Vine Grove Fire Department responded to the scene to provide mutual aid.