"Eastern Kentucky Tries To Keep Former Coal Miners From Leaving"

"Jake Bowen slips slowly down a telephone pole, his boots fixed with little metal spears to grip the wood.

'It's just like starting all over again, but I figure a couple of years the money will start rolling in better,' he says, his face dripping with sweat from the Kentucky humidity. 'It has to be better on my health. I won't be breathing in the coal dust and the rock dust no more.'

At 48, after spending years below ground in the coal mines, Bowen is preparing to work in the sky. He's enrolled in a 12-week program co-sponsored by the Hazard Community and Technical College and the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, an effort to find new work for some of the thousands of coal miners who have been laid off in recent years."

Jim Zarroli reports for NPR's Morning Edition September 3, 2016.