December Eleventh: The Night the Tornado Came

At one twenty in the morning on December eleventh, twenty twenty-one, a tornado rated EF-Three on the Enhanced Fujita scale touched down in Bowling Green and moved through residential neighborhoods in the dark. The storm killed seventeen people, injured sixty-three others, and destroyed or severely damaged more than four hundred seventy-five homes across Warren County. Estimated damage exceeded two hundred fifty million dollars.

It was a December tornado, in the middle of the night, when almost no one expects severe weather in Kentucky, and many residents were asleep with little warning before the storm arrived. Eleven of the deaths occurred on a single street. Seven of those killed were children.

The tornado tracked nearly thirty miles across Warren County with estimated peak winds of one hundred sixty-five miles per hour and a path width reaching four hundred forty yards at its widest. The Bowling Green tornado was part of a much larger outbreak of tornadoes that swept across the southern United States over the nights of December tenth and eleventh, a historic event that killed more than ninety people across multiple states. The Bowling Green storm was among the deadliest single tornadoes of the outbreak.

It cut through neighborhoods on the north and east sides of the city, including areas with high concentrations of recent immigrants and refugees who faced additional barriers in the recovery. Rebuilding continued for years. The gaps where houses once stood along the tornado's path remain visible reminders of what a few minutes of wind can take from a community.