FRANKFORT, Ky. – Gov. Andy Beshear announced award recipients for the second round of funding from the state’s County-City Bridge Improvement Program (CCBIP) today. A total of $8.2 million was awarded to 22 crucial bridge projects in three Kentucky cities and 15 counties, including $410,000 to the Calloway County Fiscal Court to repair the Clayton Town Road bridge.
“We’re continuing to deliver on our promise to improve infrastructure where it’s needed most,” Beshear said in a Kentucky Transportation Cabinet press release. “These projects will reopen closed bridges, strengthen aging ones and ensure every Kentuckian can travel safely, whether they’re headed to work, school or the doctor. This is how we build and strengthen our New Kentucky Home.”
CCBIP was established in 2024, setting aside a total of $25 million per year for fiscal years 2025 and 2026 to address local bridge closures, traffic limitations or necessary repairs. The program was designed to assist local government in maintaining safe and efficient community connections throughout the commonwealth.
This map shows all of the bridges in Calloway County. The bridge on Clayton Town Road is located east of Hazel, just off State Line Road; it is marked bridge #36 on the map above.
In February, Beshear announced $10.2 million for the first round of awards under the program. Phase 1 included 23 projects in 18 counties and the city of Winchester. In that round, Calloway County received a total of $935,000 to fund two bridge replacement projects – $430,000 for one on Clayton Road and $505,000 for one on Furches Trail.
Phase 2 includes 22 projects, including 12 new bridges that replace existing structures and 10 bridge repair/preservation projects. Of the 22 bridges, eight are currently closed.
Projects were reviewed by KYTC’s Office of the Secretary, Department of Highways, Structures Engineers, District Highway Engineers and Rural and Municipal Aid to ensure the proposed solutions would be effective.
“Each bridge plays a crucial role in daily life – supporting school routes, first responders and local economies,” said KYTC Secretary Jim Gray in the press release. “Our review committee has prioritized the projects with the greatest need. This investment helps communities stay connected and safe.”
CCBIP will continue to provide funding opportunities in future rounds. The application window for Phase 3 is currently open. KYTC encourages local governments interested in future funding opportunities to contact the Department of Rural and Municipal Aid or their local Department of Highways district office for more information.
MURRAY – At 3:41 p.m., the Murray Police Department posted on its Facebook page that it had “responded to a report of a possible burglary in progress in the area of Coldwater Road.” The post further noted that multiple suspects were in custody, and there was no threat to the public.
According to scanner traffic, an off-duty officer reported seeing a vehicle pull up to an apartment on Coldwater Road, and three individuals kicked in the door and entered the property. A handgun was found with a bullet in the chamber but no magazine, although it was not clear where the firearm was located or if the magazine was found.
Two marked Calloway County Sheriff’s Office units and one unmarked car are parked outside of the apartment the suspects allegedly attempted to rob. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
Scanner traffic also indicates that the suspects fled the scene. There were reports of a suspect being spotted on Brooklyn Drive. A drone was used to surveil a nearby apartment complex. Officers also found latex gloves, presumably used by a suspect to conceal their fingerprints, in the backyard of a home on North 18th Street.
An MPD officer squeezes through a chain link fence behind a home on North 18th Street. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)Officers load evidence in a Calloway County Sheriff’s Office vehicle parked outside the North 18th Street home. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)At 3:50 p.m., the Murray State University Police Department maintains a heavy presence at the intersection of Coldwater Road, N 18th Street and KY 121 N. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
This is an evolving story. We will report more information as it becomes available.
MURRAY – After years of planning and nearly 18 months of training, Murray-Calloway County Hospital (MCCH) launched a new consolidated electronic health record (EHR) system from Oracle Health, retiring the patchwork of platforms it used to store patients’ medical records for decades.
With a price tag expected to reach, and possibly exceed, $15 million, only the Regional Cancer Center comes close to rivaling the project in terms of capital investment, but given the fact that it impacts practically every department organization-wide, the scope and scale of the Oracle project are far beyond any of MCCH’s previous endeavors.
“I’ve told my folks to spend whatever it takes to make people comfortable.” MCCH CEO Jerry Penner told The Sentinel in 2024. “So, I basically gave them a blank check. We knew it was going to be in that ($15 million) ballpark. From the start, we never even put a budget marker on it. We knew we were going to have to spend whatever it took to get this thing done right. Thank goodness we only have to do it once.”
“You can’t touch it; you can’t feel it; you can’t see it, but you know it’s working behind the scenes. Isn’t that crazy?” he added.
At a meeting Monday morning, MCCH CEO Jerry Penner reminds support staff to expect issues to arise throughout the day. “I need you to be as calm as you possibly can,” he said. “Keep everybody calm in the trenches out there, and we’re going to get through this. I promise you. I know that because of the sweat equity that you have put into place over the last year to make this happen.” (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
The need to consolidate the three electronic records systems used throughout the organization – T-Systems in the emergency department, Athenahealth in the outpatient clinics and Meditech on the inpatient floors – has been a consideration in the board of trustees’ strategic planning for several years.
Discussions increased throughout 2022, and in early 2023, representatives from Cerner and Meditech traveled to Murray to give week-long demonstrations of their respective products. Ultimately, MCCH selected the CommunityWorks platform by Cerner, which was purchased by Oracle and subsequently rebranded as Oracle Health.
Originally, the plan was to go live with the new system in September 2024, but as the date approached, the call was made to delay the launch until this year.
The project kicked off in November 2023, when a small group of MCCH employees travelled to Oracle Health’s data center in Kansas City, Mo., for several days of project management training. (Photo provided)
Despite preparing for months upon months, some tasks could not be performed until hours before the switch. At noon on Sunday, hospital staff arrived set up patient profiles on the new system, with primary focus on transferring the records of approximately 60 admitted patients from Meditech to Oracle. Administrative staff closed out the old profiles and created the new ones, while nursing staff manually entered medication lists and orders.
Administrative and nursing staff stay busy registering patients in the Oracle system on Sunday afternoon. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
New patient wristbands and Care Aware devices, which are handheld devices, like cell phones, that nurses can use for charting as well as to scan wristbands and medication, were distributed to nursing stations throughout the hospital at 6:30 p.m.
Above: Care Aware devices are being charged in advance of the new Oracle electronic health record going live at midnight. Below: MCCH Emergency Department nurse Susan Page places Care Aware devices in the charging station Sunday evening. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)Above: MCCH Emergency Department nurse Susan Page places Care Aware devices in the charging station Sunday evening. Below: On another floor, Care Aware devices are being charged in advance of the new Oracle electronic health record going live at midnight. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
“That is a clear step in the process,” Michael Lucey said with a laugh on Sunday evening. “But there’s a lot of steps, and they all happen in sequence and concurrently.”
Lucey is the president of the Massachusetts-based consulting firm Community Hospital Advisors. MCCH contracted the company in early 2023 to guide them through the process. Penner praised Lucey’s vast experience helping community hospitals transition to new EHR systems, adding, “From the first inception, when we started all this, he’s been invaluable to us.”
In addition to Lucey’s team of roughly 15, more than 60 Oracle staff are on-site this week to help the clinical staff acclimate to the new system. MCCH also has an internal team of “super users,” who received specialized training to serve as local support staff over the coming weeks. For the first few days, support staff will be present 24 hours a day.
Clockwise from left, MCCH Chief Information Officer Aaron Rucker; Janice Macdonald and Michael Lucey with Community Hospital Advisors; and Oracle Project Manager Isabel Fontana meet in MCCH’s Dalton Conference Room, also temporarilty known as the Go Live Command Center, to discuss strategy Sunday evening. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
There are two reasons why it is necessary to have so many support staff here for the first week, Lucey explained. One is that the Oracle system has several specialized components that require expertise in specific areas, such as pharmacy, radiology and laboratory, which is further broken down into three parts.
“If there is a critical problem that happens, we have to have the people here,” he said. “I have to figure out: is it workflow, or is it technical, or is it contributing from both? Well, if I don’t have workflow people and technical people in the room – and the technical people might be from four different contributing areas, you have to have them all here.
“The other reason there’s so many is that, for these first four or five days, there’s an issue of volume over complexity. There’s just a lot of people who started using this system an hour ago; and if they have user issues or (other) issues, we have to have somebody right there beside them.”
Community Hospital Advisors President Michael Lucey explains to staff members how to report issues to the support staff Monday morning. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
On Monday, Lucey said that the switchover Sunday night went very well. He explained that, from this point, there are three types of challenges – technical, training and workflow. Technical challenges concern the system itself and whether it is performing as expected. Training challenges largely come down to the sheer volume of information people have had to learn.
“When I’m learning a lot of new things, I’m not going to learn them all. That’s the second thing,” Lucey explained. “And the third is work-flow challenges. … When I’m training someone, and I’m looking at the system, and I’m realizing, ‘So, if your supply cabinet is all the way down at the other end of the hall, having the scanner here is not a good idea.’
“Sometimes it’s a combination of that workflow recognition and a technical change that has to be made, and they interact with each other. Those are the kinds of things that you’re not actually going to recognize until you’re using the system.”
Lucey anticipated that the first few days will involve addressing mainly technical and training challenges. By Thursday, he said, workflow challenges will “rise to the top,” noting that, while some of workflow issues will require a technical change to the system, others may simply require a change in habits.
“You want to get to that place relatively quick,” Lucey said, “because if we’re resolving those things in the next three or four weeks, you keep people from reinforcing the ‘workaround.’”
To ease the transition, MCCH has deliberately throttled the number of procedures being performed and patients being seen in clinics this week, Penner advised. He acknowledged that some people may be frustrated by the limited number of available appointments but advised that it is only temporary.
“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t overwhelm the staff with bunches and bunches and bunches patients – a normal day – because it’s not going to be a normal day or a normal week,” he said. “Number one is patient safety. It’s not about trying to do something fast; it’s doing it right.”
MURRAY – The Murray State University Amateur Radio Club (MSUARC) and Calloway County Office of Emergency Management (CCOEM) activated four Skywarn nets during recent severe weather episodes.
A Skywarn net is a gathering of ham radio operators on a specific radio channel during times of severe weather where they provide immediate weather information from their location. Most of the local participants have been trained as weather spotters in classes offered by the Paducah office of the National Weather Service, but that is not a requirement of participating in the net.
Skywarn weather spotter training is free and open to the public. MSUARC and CCOEM sponsored a Murray training in March and trainings are also available in other communities or at the Paducah National Weather Service web site www.weather.gov/pah.
At the time of recent tornado warnings, Mr. Bill Call, Deputy Emergency Manager for Calloway County, was the Net Control Operator and sent out a radio call for all licensed radio operators and trained Skywarn weather spotters to check-in and report any severe weather witnessed, local damage observed or unusual events. Mr. Call, in turn, relayed important weather information (tornado or funnel formation, hail timing, location, and size, extreme wind, etc.) directly to the National Weather Service office in Paducah. The NWS uses this “ground truth” to aid their decisions about issuing warnings. Local emergency management personnel are also able to take advantage of this information from radio operators throughout the county.
During the recent severe weather episodes, Skywarn nets were conducted on March 30 with 24 spotters checking in; twice on April 2 with 41 spotters checking in the first net and 13 the second; and on April 4 with 19 check-ins.
Anyone interested in learning more about ham radio can check out www.k4msu.com or attend the monthly meetings at 7:00pm on the first Tuesday of each month in the Freed Curd Auditorium in the Collins Industry and Technology Center at MSU.
MURRAY – On April 7, the National Weather Service Paducah Office confirmed the 13th and 14th tornados from the severe weather that came through the area April 2-5, both of which were in Calloway County. One was part of the tornado outbreak on April 2, but the other came the following evening, when there were no tornado warnings in the county.
According to Paducah NWS’s official report, the “Bell City/Murray” tornado had an estimated peak wind speed 100 mph, rating it an EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, and reached a maximum width of 200 yards.
Powerful winds from the tornado that touched down in southwest Calloway County Wednesday night moved this tobacco barn, located near the Graves County line on Edgehill Trail, more than a foot off its foundation. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
The tornado originally touched down at 9:17 p.m. in north Weakley County, Tennessee, and ultimately, traveled 17.49 before lifting, according to NWS. It briefly moved through Graves County, destroying a garage and uprooting near the intersection KY 97 and Edgehill Trail/KY 1270 before entering Calloway County.
It damaged several barns, countless trees and at least two center-pivot irrigation systems as it traveled along Edgehill Trail, Dublin Drive, Rayburn Road and Humphrey Road. There were also reports of damaged trees on Wiswell Road, near Oaks Country Club Road, and Robertson Road South.
A tornado skirted the Story’s Chapel Cemetery in southwest Calloway County Wednesday night, littering the hillside with downed trees, snapped trunks, broken branches and artificial flowers. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
“From what I found mostly, right around the Graves County line on 1270, I think is where it might have touched down,” Calloway County Emergency Management Director Josh Kerr told The Sentinel. “It kind of looks like it almost hopscotched – so, it would go down for a while, up, down – which would make sense because when it got to Murray it kind of went back up, thankfully.”
But all areas of town were not unscathed. NWS cited damage around Glendale Road and at the intersection of 4th and Sycamore streets.
Top: On Kirkwood Drive, a blooming redbud split in all directions and shingles litter the road. Bottom: Debris from a metal roof is strewn on both sides of Sycamore Street just before the Fourth Street intersection. (JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel)
“The tornado then moved into the southwest and south sides of the city of Murray, where it uprooted a few trees and damaged the gutters and shingles on a few homes,” the NWS report stated. “Near the intersection of Fourth Street and Sycamore, the tornado lifted the roof off of automobile repair shop and then lifted shortly thereafter.”
The same night, an EF-2 tornado plowed through Ballard and McCracken counties. At 1000 yards wide, it was the widest tornado reported by Paducah NWS that night.
Although storms continued to dump rain across the area, Calloway County did not have any tornado warnings the next night; nonetheless, an EF-0 tornado touched down east of town at 10:23 p.m., on KY 94 E and traveled nearly nine miles, roughly following Pottertown Road/KY 280, before ending west of New Concord eight minutes later.
“An EF-0 tornado began east of Murray along Highway 94, where it damaged the roof of a commercial building and a nearby church,” the NWS report stated. “The tornado continued eastward along Pottertown Road and through the Pottertown community, where it damaged a couple outbuildings and uprooted a few trees in wet soil. The tornado also downed several large tree limbs. The tornado ended near the shoreline of Kentucky Lake in eastern Calloway County.”
MURRAY – Several Murray-Calloway County Hospital employees are busy today making the final preparations before going online with the new Oracle electronic health record system at midnight tonight.
At noon, staff began the process of closing out patients’ records in the old Meditech system and uploading them in the new system. MCCH Chief Information Officer Aaron Rucker said they will officially shut down Meditech later tonight, but it will be a couple of hours before Oracle is ready to go online. During that down period, medical staff will use paper charts.
Photos by JESSICA PAINE/The Murray Sentinel
New patient wristbands and Care Aware devices, which are handheld devices, like cell phones, that nurses can use for charting as well as to scan wristbands and medication, were distributed to nursing stations throughout the hospital at 6:30 p.m.
The Murray-Calloway County Hospitla Board of Trustees Finance Committee will meet at noon in the hospital’s Garrison Boardroom and via Zoom (call 270-762-1102 for Zoom connection details).
