Blue Oval SK updates Hardin County on hiring, safety and production timeline

Kelly McAllister, external affairs director for Blue Oval SK, updated the Hardin County Fiscal Court on June 10 about staffing, safety and production at the electric-vehicle battery campus near Glendale.

McAllister said the company has “more than a thousand employees on our Kentucky campus,” 1,400 employees across its operations, and that “91% of our hires are local.” She described hiring and training processes tied to a $35 million state-supported training center at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College: classes start almost every week and new hires complete roughly five weeks of training at ECTC before entering the plant.

On safety and an incident review, McAllister told the court, “If you were paying attention, obviously, you have seen the news that we had a thermal event on our campus on April 27. It occurred in an exterior unmanned facility on the southwest corner of our facility…There were no injuries, and we were able to continue our normal plant operation.” She said a post-incident investigation identified a misaligned pump shaft—likely caused by repeated on/off testing of equipment the machinery was not designed to endure—and that the company has added monitoring and preventive measures.

McAllister described facility scale, safety resources and local impact: the campus buildings total roughly 4 million square feet; the company maintains on-site emergency responders, two conventional fire trucks and a smaller electric fire truck designed for indoor use; and the company said it follows federal, state and local safety standards.

She gave an overview of Kentucky 2—work on the second building is “on pause,” she said; the structure is shelled out, the interior is empty and the company has met safety requirements to close up the building, with market conditions determining any future buildout. McAllister said tariffs and global supply-chain shifts are monitored and could affect costs, because many components are sourced internationally.

On production timing, McAllister said the company is not yet selling batteries but expects to “begin full production this year, second half of this year” and invited county officials to future plant events. The company also said starting wages for many hourly roles range from $21 to $38 per hour and that employees hired at $21 see an automatic increase to $23.50 after 90 days.