From tornadoes to floods and ice storms.

Kentucky has had its share of severe weather events and natural disasters.

Emergency management and eight Central Kentucky counties now have new resources to respond to those situations.

Our Laura Rogers explains.

More from Hardin County.

And makes us much more efficient in our response.

Times are much more efficient, too.

Lieutenant Travis Cook with the Hardin County Sheriff's Office flying an m 350 drone, one of five aircraft now in the department's fleet there a.

Viable resource for us.

We use them for a lot of things.

Search and rescue for missing persons.

We use it for accident, reconstruction.

The lincoln trail area development district hosted a press conference wednesday in elizabeth town.

And today we are celebrating a grand.

Slam, announcing the new fleet of advanced drones in eight area counties.

These are $40,000 machines designed for search and rescue.

What we're doing is picking up heat signatures here now.

They were purchased with federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act and support from a local bank.

Can help in a major natural disaster or in a missing persons case.

Law enforcement says it can even help in situations like train derailment.

Small towns and not the trains hauling some kind of hazardous material.

So instead of putting a deputy in harm's way and having to walk that one or two miles of railhead, we just put the cart in the air and we'll fly that drone down that rail.

We can put non aerial drones in the air in an hour and a half or less at any location in this region for search and rescue.

Just as eastern Kentucky or western Kentucky, how important that would be to save lives.

London referring to deadly and destructive tornadoes and flooding in Kentucky over the past few years.

This drone fleet will be able to survey damage.

It will be able to find people that are in need of help.

Water search and.

Rescue.

One of the drones can even go underwater with imaging the end goal to save more lives in the event of an emergency.

I believe we always have to be better and better and better prepared.

For Kentucky Edition.

I'm Laura Rogers.

Thank you, Laura.

The funding also created a community response team with an engineer on staff.

They say speeding up response on survey items or survey times, rather, will help get federal assistance faster.