Bowling Green Public Works adding new retention basins in neighborhoods
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – While the heat may be sweltering and the land dry, the Bowling Green Public Works Department is taking what it has learned from the floods of 2025 and is taking action to better protect some of the most flood-prone areas around the city.
Fair Street is the most active spot right now, as crews are in the midst of finishing a new retention pond built to withstand and alleviate pains that we could see with future torrential rain falls.
“That storm water storage basin, like almost all of them, will be connected straight down into the cave system through an injection well, a karst injection well, and we’ve designed this so that it will hold a three hour, 100 year storm, which for this area is about four inches of rainfall, should be able to go into this area and be stored safely so that the road is still accessible and no one’s home is flooded,” said Environmental and Stormwater utility manager Matt Powell.
The site on Fair Street itself has been no easy feat to complete, as the project itself is a balancing act between the surface and the karst system beneath their feet.
“We’re balancing how much storage we can get above the surface versus how well the karst can help us to drain it out. There’s always going to have to be a karst connection with a storm water storage basin, because otherwise the water would just sit in it indefinitely. And so then you’ve got mosquito problems. You’ve got all sorts of issues with that standing water, a nuisance, a hazard for small animals and children” Powell said.
The Fair Street project is just one of a few happening around Bowling Green that is a result of the 2025 flooding.
This year has, however, proved to be troublesome in its own right. The dry weather is now becoming a problem for some areas around town, opening up sinkholes and as even impacted some infrastructure.
“There are two different kinds of weather patterns that exacerbate sinkhole formation. One is very, very wet weather. The other is very, very dry weather. We’ve had 17 new reports of sinkholes over the course of the last month. Not all of those are public. Not all of those turned out to be a sinkhole that was worthy of attention. But we do have some more sinkhole projects,” Powell said.
Powell says that the work on Fair Street will cost around $500,000 to $600,000, and will be working on other properties acquired throughout Bowling Green to install better water retention projects.
