For Store Manager Kyle Gerkins and his staff at the Advance Auto Parts location at 2223 Russellville Road, the mood was light on Wednesday as they enjoyed coffee and doughnuts and welcomed some guests.

The scenario was a bright contrast to last year for the business.

Almost 12 months to the day earlier, in the wee hours of the morning, Gerkins was surveying a nightmarish scene at the same address: the rubble left behind by an EF-3 tornado that took 17 lives in Warren County and took his store down to its foundation.

“I could hear the tornado from my house in Rockfield,” Gerkins said on Wednesday, recalling the night of Dec. 10-11, 2021. “When we knew it had gone through, I got a call that the burglar alarm had gone off in the store.

“I came down at about 1:45 a.m., and the building was just rubble. The tornado pretty much leveled it, and our products were strewn throughout the neighborhood. For the next couple of weeks we heard from people who had found brake pads, rotors and other parts, but nothing could be salvaged.”

Except the business itself.

Just a few days before the Dec. 11 anniversary of the tornado, a brand-new Advance Auto store stood where the old building had served customers from its opening in 1993 until the harrowing night that store employee Janice Froedge remembers well.

“My daughter and I went down there early that morning (Dec. 11), and the safe was the only thing still standing,” Froedge said on Wednesday as store employees and customers celebrated a ceremonial ribbon cutting. “There were no walls.”

That sight is just a bad memory now as Froedge and her co-workers are back at a store that has been not just rebuilt but enlarged to fit a new purpose.

“We’ve expanded,” Gerkins said. “The store is almost 10,000 square feet now, making it the biggest store in the area.”

The Russellville Road Advance Auto Parts, expanded from its original size of 7,500 square feet, also has higher ceilings that allow for more shelving.

“We’ve increased the product inventory, so we’re able to supply other stores in the area,” Gerkins said. “We deliver products to our stores in Glasgow, Morgantown and Munfordville.”

The grand opening was particularly pleasing for Gerkins, who was shifted around a bit while Advance Auto upper management worked through the lengthy process of rebuilding his store.

“I spent six months at the Advance store in Leitchfield,” he said. “Then I helped out at the other two Bowling Green stores while preparing to re-open this one.”

Although he is enjoying the new, roomier store, Gerkins is still in something of a rebuilding mode.

“We retained five employees,” he said. “We’re up to 11 now, but we’re still staffing up. We’d like to get to 14.”