He called in at Gee's Bend, a poor black corner of Alabama, and Inez, a tiny Kentucky coal town where Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty (a third of Inez's residents remain below the poverty line).
New director awards went to Canada's Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais for his dark comedy, Whitewash about a man trying to survive a harsh Canadian winter, and American Sean Dunne for Oxyana, set in a rural coal mining town riddled with an addiction to pain relief medication.
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It was an old Mid-western coal-mining town, where there was no more mining, and very few other places to work.
Half a century ago Yubari, on the northern island of Hokkaido, was a coal-mining town with more than 100, 000 people.
At least 11 workers were injured in the incident at the Collum coal mine in the southern town of Sinazongwe.
The concept of heating underground coal to a combustion point may lead one to recall Centralia, PA, an abandoned town in Pennsylvania sitting on a coal seam which has been burning for 50 years, but the UCG controlled process makes that outcome highly unlikely.
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Ian Lavery, who worked in coal pits in Ashington, a town in northeast England, watched his father, two brothers and several uncles all lose their jobs as miners.
There's nothing new about turning coal into gas--19th-century street lamps burned "town gas, " a dangerous mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, produced by blasting coal with steam.
In its heyday, during the productive coal mining years of the 1920s, the town boasted nearly 30, 000 residents.
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Price and I drove down Route 33 from Athens, into Meigs County and a town called Pomeroy, which once had been a loading dock for coal barges and now lay prostrate and blighted along the Ohio River.
Miller is perhaps better known for journeying across small-town Texas to rally ranchers in opposition to TXU's plans for more coal-fired plants, an effort that catapulted her to the central role in a recent Robert Redford-narrated documentary, Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars.
Across town, the abandoned detritus of an industrial past and the ugly scars of the coal mines that still drive the archipelago's economy sit uneasily against the backdrop of a pristine wilderness protected by some of the world's strictest environmental legislation.
But the steady flow of coal and commerce does not stop in Broken Bow, where small stores in the center of town may be showing some improved signs of economic life, but making ends meet on the land gets harder every year.
With coal gone, he says, Barnsley has to find a different purpose as a market town, which it has been since the 13th century.
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Three families will be selected to appear in the Coal House series, which will send people back in time to taste life in a 1927 south Wales mining town.
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