Empty beer bottles. A dirty pair of pants. A stained couch cushion.

The garbage found Thursday night under the Old Louisville Road bridge and the Riverwalk pedestrian bridge hundreds of feet apart could have been the remnants of a prior visit by a member of Bowling Green’s homeless population.

Pam Hurt and Terrill Elkin negotiated the rough terrain under the bridges last night in an effort to find and interview a homeless person, two of several volunteers who took part in the statewide 2009 Point-In-Time Count of Kentucky’s homeless.

Volunteers from various nonprofit organizations, churches and other agencies scoured the region throughout the day and night Thursday, searching abandoned buildings and isolated spaces.

The count of outdoor homeless was scheduled to take place Jan. 29, along with a similar count of homeless staying in shelters, but the winter ice storm that hit the area delayed the outdoor count.

Deborah Williams, executive director for Housing Assistance and Development Services Inc. and Point-In-Time Coordinator for the Barren River Area, said volunteers counted about 300 people staying in homeless shelters Jan. 29.

Hurt, assistant director of Barren River Area Safe Space, and Elkin, facilities administrator for BRASS, were unable to find any homeless people outside last night with temperatures hovering around the freezing point.

Williams said the cold, breezy conditions would make it difficult for volunteers to find very many homeless outdoors.

“If they can find a spot where they can be under something, they will do that; it’s just a matter of (volunteers) knowing where to look,” Williams said last night. “But if they can find a shelter tonight, they will.”

Normally, a headquarters of sorts is set up at HANDS Inc. where volunteers gather to coordinate where and when they plan to search for homeless and to pick up and later turn in survey forms for the homeless people they interview.

Because of the weather delay, however, groups of volunteers already had the paperwork from three weeks earlier and organized on their own.

“We looked around Lampkin Park in the dugouts there and behind the (depot),” said Hurt, who, along with Elkin, looked from around 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The annual homeless count has a purpose beyond getting a sense of how many homeless are living in the area.

For the second consecutive year, agencies across the state surveyed their regional homeless population on the same day, in a count coordinated by the Kentucky Housing Corp.

Volunteers fill out anonymous 24-question surveys with sheltered and unsheltered homeless.

The KHC gathers the data from each agency and passes it along to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which incorporates that information into its formula for allocating funding for housing initiatives such as the Supportive Housing Program and the Emergency Shelter Grant Program.

Last year, the Point-in-Time Count found 528 homeless people in the 10-county Barren River Area Development District, with 202 in Warren County. A final count from this year’s survey isn’t yet available.

Elkin was taking part in his third count; during a previous count he found a group of homeless people living in the abandoned Holley Carburetor building, which has since been demolished.

“There was about four or five of them there,” Elkin said. “We couldn’t get them to talk; they were either asleep or passed out. We just counted them in our survey, we didn’t actually get to interview them.”

While crossing the Riverwalk pedestrian bridge, they encountered four Bowling Green Police Department cadets, who told them that given the cold temperatures any homeless would most likely seek shelter at The Salvation Army.

Hurt and Elkin also searched behind the bingo hall on Kentucky Street and at the Greyhound bus station on Parker Avenue, where the man working the ticket counter said that three homeless left Bowling Green on Wednesday from the station.

The ticket taker, who declined to be identified, said that the homeless people he has encountered at the bus station tell him they often leave the city when they realize the public transportation system is not sufficient for them to get around town.