Doomsday Finally Comes to Wyoming's High-Flying Coal Country

April 6, 2016 — 12:29 PM EDT

For the past four decades, Wyoming’s coal miners have been the nation’s most fortunate. With little more than a high-school degree and a few weeks of training, they could make upward of $80,000 a year. They worked open-pit mines, meaning that unlike their counterparts in Appalachia, they were spared the dangers of collapsing tunnels or black lungs. Their product—subbituminous coal from the Powder River Basin, in the northeast part of the state—was coveted due to its low-sulfur content and eventually claimed a dominant 40 percent of the U.S. market.

Even as shale's recent boom cut into coal’s bottom line—gas and coal now each provide 33 percent of the nation’s electricity—Wyoming stayed the course. Most of the state's miners live in the gleaming prairie town of Gillette. The prevailing sentiment there has long been that other Americans are woefully uneducated about coal’s necessity and that far too much has been made of climate change. People held to the notion that the coal downturn was entirely the doing of President Obama’s administration and that the industry would soon rebound. Neither Wyoming Governor Matt Mead nor Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King discusses the possibility of the state going the way of, say, West Virginia. The glass in coal country remained mostly full—right up until the layoffs started.

“This isn't a natural disaster,” Mead said last week, “but it's certainly a disaster in terms of the personal lives of those miners.”

Arch Coal, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January, laid off more than 200 Wyoming miners last Thursday. The move came shortly after Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, told 235 local miners not to report to work and instead to show up at one of a series of meetings, including a gathering on April 1 at the Holiday Inn Express in the small oil town of Douglas.

“They don’t want a bunch of us angry guys in one place.”

It was not an April Fool’s joke. The miners arrived around 8 a.m., many of them in jacked-up pickup trucks and hooded sweatshirts. A small group of reporters standing out front of the hotel were frequently shooed away by a Peabody representative. One by one, the miners walked inside. They emerged carrying folders labeled with the name of their former employer that contained details of their severance packages. The laid-off miners included a single father of three, a heavy-set guy preparing for surgery, and a young Montanan in a Carhartt hoodie who expressed interest in Nevada’s gold mines. An older man in cowboy boots didn’t feel much like talking. A bearded guy called Peabody’s executives “crooks.” He said he’d been given a two-line slip of paper telling him to come to the meeting. “The whole way they handled it was sleazy,” he said, adding a few expletives before stalking off.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/doomsday-finally-comes-to-wyoming-s-high-flying-coal-country