With coal jobs disappearing in Eastern Kentucky, miners are leaving home for greener pastures

Eastern Kentucky has lost more than 5,700 coal jobs in the past two years, and the region has very few if any jobs that pay as well, so its people are leaving in search of a more prosperous future. But as coal companies move west to places like Indiana, Illinois and Wyoming, what's being left behind are dying towns and a fading way of life in Central Appalachia.

Coal fields of the Eastern United States

"Out-of-work miners are leaving Kentucky or heading to the state's western coal region, which is part of a separate basin that stretches into Illinois and Indiana," Kris Maher reports for The Wall Street Journal. "The thicker seams of high-sulfur coal there now can be mined less expensively after lying untouched for decades, and mines are hiring." And areas like Harlan County, which has an unemployment rate of 16.3 percent, the 13th highest in the nation, have seen the population drop from 45,000 in the 1980s to 28,000 today. While coal jobs keep falling in Eastern Kentucky, Western Kentucky has flourished, with jobs increasing from 2,200 to 4,200 in the past 10 years. Coal jobs in Wyoming, home of large-scale strip mines with thick seams, have risen from 4,800 to 6,660.

Brandon Madon, who moved from Harlan County to the western side of the state for a mining job in Indiana, told Maher, "It'd be real hard to get on anywhere now unless you go out west to work. We can ride it out up here. (Back home) it's getting worse every day." Wendell Cohelia also left Harlan County for Western Kentucky, where he not only found a secure job in the coal industry, but for nearly twice as much pay. He told Maher, "It's going to be difficult. I feel lucky that I got a job, not just that it increased my pay." (Read more)