Hazard, Kentucky, a town hard-hit from coal-mining closings, is struggling to employ its out-of-work coal miners through a mix of local, state, federal and private programs.
Tony Bowling is 52. He was born, raised and still lives in Hazard, Kentucky, a small town in the southeastern corner of the state, deep in the heart of Appalachia’s coal country. Like many of Hazard’s roughly 5,300 citizens, he hails from a long line of coal workers. “Every male on both sides of my family, going back at least three generations, worked in the mines,” said Bowling, himself an underground miner for more than 10 years.
But like so many miners in Hazard, surrounding Perry County and throughout eastern Kentucky, Bowling was laid off, another victim of the coal industry’s steady decline nationwide, especially over the past decade.
“The TECO Coal Corp. mine I worked for completely shut down,” he said, recalling identical fates with two other mining companies he’d worked for until being laid off. “I finally said enough is enough.”
That was in 2012. Two years later, still looking for a steady job, Bowling signed up for a 10-week training program at Hazard Community and Technical College (HCTC) to earn certification as an electrical lineman. He’s been working, aboveground instead of below it ever since — just not in Hazard. His job has taken him to Ohio, Florida, Maine, North Carolina and now to Puerto Rico. “I’m making more money now than I ever did in the mines,” he said, adding that he’s also an instructor in the program on weekends.
Bowling’s story is emblematic of the boom-and-bust history of the coal industry in Appalachia, a largely rural 13-state swath that runs from southern New York to northeastern Mississippi. And while he successfully switched careers, thousands of fellow miners in and around Hazard are unemployed, despite numerous job-training initiatives such as HCTC’s lineman program.
“We’re still dealing with the aftermath of layoffs in the coal industry,” said Michael Cornett, director of agency expansion and public relations of the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, a nonprofit, federally funded workforce development organization established in 1968 and headquartered in Hazard. “You don’t recover from the loss of 13,000 coal industry jobs [in eastern Kentucky] since 2011 overnight.”
Today only seven companies produce coal near Hazard, including Blue Diamond Coal, ICG Hazard and Cumberland River Coal. During the industry’s heyday, dozens of companies operated mines in Perry County. In 2008 the region produced 17 million tons of coal annually. It dropped to about 4.1 million tons last year.
Layoffs topped out in 2016, when the state’s coal industry slumped to its lowest point in 118 years, according to a report by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. The number of jobs statewide dropped by nearly 1,500 during just the first three months of that year, or 17.9 percent, leaving an estimated 6,900 employees in the industry. Eastern Kentucky lost 21.6 percent of its coal jobs during the quarter, while the drop in the state’s western coalfield was 12.2 percent. The last time Kentucky had so few coal jobs was 1898, when they averaged 6,399, the report said.
Today’s unemployment rate in eastern Kentucky ranges from 9 percent to 12 percent, said Jared Arnett, executive director of Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a nonprofit agency formed in 2013 as a coordinator for economic development and job creation resources in eastern Kentucky. “But the real number that speaks more to the problem is the labor participation rate,” he stated. “We run at about 44 percent, while the national average is 70 percent. That’s the crux of the challenge.”
It’s no secret that the U. S. coal industry has been struggling for years. Industry advocates often blame the Obama administration’s “war on coal,” specifically two signature policies to reduce fossil fuels’ carbon emissions — the Clean Power Plan, which never went into effect before the Trump administration moved to eliminate it altogether, and the Paris Climate Agreement, from which the United States has withdrawn.
A majority of economists, business and energy analysts instead agree that coal’s demise is due to a triple whammy: competition from much cheaper and cleaner-burning natural gas, proliferated by fracking technology; growth in the solar and wind energy production; and tougher environmental regulations. In Appalachia coal production fell by nearly 45 percent overall between 2005 and 2015, according to a recent analysis by the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development agency established by Congress in 1965. As a result, since 2011 the entire region has lost about 33,500 mining jobs.
Hardest hit has been eastern Kentucky, which has endured the highs and lows of the coal marketplace for more than 100 years. Times were best when mining wide veins of high-sulfur, bituminous coal close to the surface was cheap and demand was high, and worst once miners had to dig deeper and demand dropped. Literally the fuel of America’s Industrial Revolution and growth, coal has fallen from providing more than half of the nation’s electricity as recently as 2000 to 30 percent in 2017.
“Coal is only viable to extract when the price is very high,” said Chris Bollinger, an economics professor and director of the Center for Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky, which recently published the 2018 Kentucky Annual Economic Report . “It’s not now and hasn’t been for a while, and it isn’t likely to recover.” Plus, he noted, because coal from western states, including Wyoming — by far the nation’s top coal producer — is considerably cheaper than Appalachia’s, “even if there’s a big resurgence in demand, it’s not likely to be for Kentucky coal.”
At the same time eastern Kentucky is striving to employ out-of-work miners through a mix of local, state, federal and private programs, communities are dealing with endemic poverty, opioid abuse, aging infrastructure, environmental issues and a deficient K–12 education system. Other single-industry areas, such as Detroit and Pittsburgh with their auto and steel industries, respectively, have fallen on hard times. But whereas those cities generally rebounded, Hazard continues to whirl in an imperfect storm of circumstances, both natural and man-made.
Although jobs are in precious demand, a deep-rooted spirit of resilience abounds. “There is still a lot of hope in the region,” said Jennifer Lindon, president of the Hazard Community and Technical College, one of several entities tasked with not only developing a non-coal workforce but also attracting other businesses and launching whole new industries. She grew up in Hazard and returned after earning a Ph. D. at Mississippi State University, so she shares the local pride and heritage surrounding coal. “We had bumper stickers that said, ‘Coal Is King.’ I am not against coal.”
Yet Lindon also acknowledged the deleterious impacts of that legacy. “We knew we needed to diversify our economy,” she said, “but for whatever reasons we did not.”
The human toll is high unemployment coupled with a lack of opportunity for jobs nearby, although several manufacturers are planning new facilities within a couple hours drive from Hazard. Briady Industries, near Ashland, aims to open a state-subsidized $1.3 billion aluminum rolling mill by 2020, with the promise of more than 550 jobs. Silver Liner has said it will employ 50 people to assemble tanker trucks in Pikeville when its operations begin later this year. Last December, EnerBlu, a California-based advanced battery maker, announced plans to erect a $412-million gigafactory in Pikeville — on the site of a shuttered coal mine — slated to launch in 2020 and employ up to 875 workers.
In the meantime, HCTC offers training programs designed to put unemployed miners back to work right away. The most successful has been the lineman course Bowling completed. “We’ve trained around 186 people, mostly miners, in the program,” Lindon reported, “and we have a 90 percent placement rate.”
There’s a hitch, however. Most of those jobs are out of town, requiring linemen to be on the road during the week and travel home on weekends. Some jobs are even more demanding.
