Coal and miners spiral down together: Lussenhop at BBC
"The Colstrip plant is fed by a nearby open-pit strip mine, and together, this so-called "mine to mouth" operation employs about 650 workers at its peak ... a city where coal energy is pretty much the sole economic driver, making up as much as 80% of its tax revenue ... this tiny city boasts a $12m annual budget, which translates into excellent schools, immaculate city parks and gleaming recreation facilities. The fire and police departments are fully staffed, crime and property taxes are low"
"Colstrip earlier that day - a town of less than 2,300 residents with one gas station and one grocery store"
"in 2019 ... two of the companies who own a share of the energy output from Colstrip announced that they were shuttering their portion of the plant, known as Units 1 and 2. "
"Those closures led Hunter to move his family to Arizona, where he's originally from. Although he still has a job in Colstrip and travels there to work, he no longer plans to raise his family there. He worries the local high school won't even exist four years from now"
""It's been trickling away here for 10 years, watching this town get a little bit smaller, get a little bit smaller," "
"Williams - a former plant administrator who helped incorporate the city in 1998 and has served as its mayor for the majority of the years since ... said that his residents will not be the only ones suffering the loss of coal tax dollars, the entire state will feel that pain. "
"I feel that those large, multibillion [dollar] companies that have made millions and millions of dollars as a result of the efforts of the people that live and work in Colstrip place little value on what their futures are,"
"They understand the debt that they owe to this community. They understand it, whether they'll recognise it with actions, I doubt."
"It's the investors and the utilities that have the most say in this," he said. "The policies handed down from Washington or from the state legislature can make it easier to get a mine permit or to get a power plant permit. But they have no swing over what the financials is."
"perhaps it could become a destination retirement community, or a hotbed of wind power, with its valuable transmission lines that run all the way to the Pacific Northwest. There is already a wind farm under development in the area"
"The NPRC released a study showing that if coal companies do a thorough clean-up of the 6.7 million cubic yards of toxic coal ash currently sitting in ponds on the plant property, the project could yield 218 jobs. "
"One job affects seven people. Well, if there's 200 people working from the reservation just south of here, working here in Colstrip, that job affects 1,400 people due to disparities in the system,"
"At the end of the day, these are a business. And when those businesses don't make money anymore, they shut them down."
"The virus ripped through the Northern Cheyenne reservation, infecting nearly half the population ... Small lost several members of his own circle to the virus, including his grandfather, his 48-year-old cousin, and a close childhood friend who was only 45. At the tail end of his election, Small contracted the virus himself. "
"I've lost so much of my family here lately that you know, I'm kind of hitting that point where, shit, I don't need to stick around. Nobody left,"
"Every time you lose something, there's less of something to come home to. I don't know, maybe in the end, I'll go on a journey of some sorts and never look back. You never know."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2020-55050347I been thru there, just east of where I-90 makes the bend south after Billings. Real big sky country.
sidd