From Whitesburg's Mountain Eagle: Calla plant

From an anonymous poster: Just Speak Your Piece column from Whitesburg's Mountain Eagle:

I finally figured out why we need an airport so bad. It's because when we get the prison we will need an airport to fly the prisoners to Letcher County. All kidding aside, where is the prison going to be built? We've had a lot of talk about it, but then all of a sudden it's hushed up. Is the prison going to be built, yes or no? If so, when? That's the question of the week. Does anyone really know?

You might ask yourself, 'Where is a lot of Letcher County that's not in Letcher County?' It's sitting down at Calla. That's in Estill County and it's part of the old South East Coal Company. It's part of the gob left over from the old coal prep plant. There are approximately 450,000 to 500,000 tons of gob sitting at the prep plant in Calla which probably will never be recovered. There was supposed to be a steam plant built to use this stuff to burn for power, but it never happened. This process is on the table with James River Coal at Blue Diamond in Leatherwood to burn 400,000 tons of recoverable coal from their silt ponds. It's already being done at the Jim Walter Resources mines in Brookwood, Alabama, which is going to recover 150 million tons of coal from its waste pond site. We've come a long way in mining since the days of the pony mines.