Bowling Green, KY Fire Regulations: Wildfire Zones (2026)

Bowling Green's wildfire risk is shaped by its geology and climate rather than by WUI rulemaking. The City sits in the Western Pennyroyal karst region; per the University of Kentucky's Kentucky Geological Survey, about 90 percent of Warren County is built on karst, with more than 350 cave entrances and over 30 km of mapped cave passage. The City is not within a federally mapped Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), and Kentucky does not adopt the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code (IWUIC) statewide. The Kentucky Building Code (815 KAR 7:120, currently the 2018 KBC 4th Edition effective December 3, 2024) is the statewide, uniform, mandatory building code and bars local building-code adoptions, so cities cannot independently adopt IWUIC. Wildfire-relevant rules instead come from two sources: (1) the Kentucky Division of Forestry's statutory forest-fire hazard seasons under KRS 149.400, which prohibit outdoor burning within 150 feet of woodland or brushland between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. during February 15 to April 30 and October 1 to December 15; and (2) Bowling Green's local open-burning permit requirement at Code Section 12-6, which restricts permitted burns to 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. during the same seasonal windows, requires a 30-ft setback from combustibles, caps pile height at 4 ft, and bans burns at wind speeds of 10 mph or higher. The most acute brush-fire risk in Bowling Green is dry-spring or dry-fall grass adjacent to wooded areas in the city's south and east.