Lisa Rice Library opens cooling center

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The Lisa Rice Library opens its cooling center for the second time this summer to help the community battle the heat.

The Lisa Rice Library used one of its conference rooms today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. as a resource for the entire community to use to fight the heat. Inside the cooling center, the room was filled with fans, ice water, popsicles and a family-friendly movie for people to watch. The library believes that since they have the resources to host a cooling center, it’s the least that they can do for the community.

Community resilience lead at the Warren County Public Library, Gracie Harris, believes that having a cooling center is one of the library’s top priorities.

“People having a space to be able to cool down and regulate your body temperature in an area that’s already familiar, in a building that’s already familiar, is a really low lift for us to be able to offer. Putting together a cooling center takes work. But in the grand scheme, if it’s helping, you know, reduce heat-related illness or mortality, that’s an easy yes for us,” says Harris.

The Lisa Rice library also hopes that community members who do utilize the cooling center will also be exposed to the other resources that the library has to offer, such as renting out laptops, or, of course, checking out books.

“Whether it’s getting the phone number to call someone to fix their AC at home or just getting a really nice cold drink of ice water. Those are things that we can do really easily and happily with. It makes sense for us to offer cooling centers at the library because we are a low-barrier resilience hub, and then we’re also already a community resource that our patrons and local organizations already have trust with. And so, that’s something we’re really happy to be able to offer to them as well,” says Harris.

The library has been opening cooling centers, weather pending, for the past two to three years and will continue to open its doors for cooling centers during heat waves to help the community. Along with the Lisa Rice Library holding cooling centers, the Bob Kirby branch also holds them as well. This way people in the community can have two locations to utilize during heat waves.

To find out more about the cooling centers and to stay up to date on when the next one will be open, visit their website at warrenpl.org.