The Woolly Worm Festival is in Beattyville a week from today, the 23rd through the 25th. Main Street closes for three days — vendors, two stages, a parade, a car show, and woolly worm races up vertical strings. #FriendsOfCoal

It is National Fossil Day. In the eastern Kentucky coalfield there are mollusk shells from the Pennsylvanian that still carry their mother-of-pearl and their original color patterns. Three hundred million years on. #FriendsOfCoal

At one industrial park in northern China a coal prep plant, a power station and a cement works sit within two kilometers of each other. Byproducts from the first two now replace up to 40% of the cement in pourable backfill. #FriendsOfCoal

Kentucky turned 1,541 elk loose on old strip mines between 1997 and 2002, after about 150 years with none. The herd now runs around 13,000 head, the largest east of the Rockies. #FriendsOfCoal

A utility serving western Kentucky has told the state it expects to keep its coal-fired plants running past 2050 — twenty-four years out, in a planning document filed with the Public Service Commission. #FriendsOfCoal

Western Kentucky has its first share of abandoned mine land revitalization money — $6.6 million across three projects, including a CT scanner at Baptist Health Deaconess and welding equipment for a new Muhlenberg County training facility. #FriendsOfCoal

Coal tar came off the gasworks as a black sludge nobody wanted. The German dye companies went looking for what was in it. One of them was Bayer, and in 1897 a chemist there produced a stable form of acetylsalicylic acid. They registered the name aspirin. #FriendsOfCoal

EPA has repealed the rule that would have closed most of America's coal plants. The grid's own reliability regulator says 13 of its 23 assessment areas face resource adequacy problems over the next ten years. Those plants are staying. #FriendsOfCoal

Coal often moves by rail, and in the coalfields the tracks run right through town. This week is See Tracks? Think Train Week, the tenth one. Expect a train, every time, at every crossing. #FriendsOfCoal

A miner in eastern Kentucky once reported finding real wood in a seam. It was a coal ball — a lump where peat turned to stone before it could turn to coal, preserving the plants inside cell by cell. Geologists have rebuilt whole forests from them. #FriendsOfCoal

In 1972 engineers in northern Illinois put 246,000 cubic yards of coal fly ash under 7,500 feet of expressway embankment to see whether it would hold. Fifty-four years on, no settlement, no frost damage. The road is still on it. #FriendsOfCoal

A lot of coal leaves the mine on a truck. This week is National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, the 38th one, and in the coalfields that means the haul-road drivers running the same narrow grades in every kind of weather. #FriendsOfCoal

Twenty-five years ago today. We remember the nearly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and aboard United Flight 93 — and the first responders who went in after them. Never forgotten. #FriendsOfCoal

Five railroad trestles built in 1906 to haul coal out of Minden, West Virginia, are being rebuilt this month — not for coal trains, but for hikers. The $11.8 million project will make the Rend Trail New River Gorge's first fully accessible earthen trail. #FriendsOfCoal

Friends of Coal was a Field Goal Sponsor of the 53rd Annual Kentucky Bash, September 4 in Lexington. Proceeds benefit @eastersealshq Bluegrass: pediatric and adult therapy, adaptive recreation, and equine therapy. #FriendsOfCoal

Labor Day was set aside for working people. In the coalfields that means the crews who run a section, ride the mantrip in and back out, keep the belt turning and the air moving. To every crew in Kentucky, thank you. #FriendsOfCoal

Water draining from a worked-out mine can be cleaned and mined at the same time. West Virginia University pipes it through a hillside plant; it comes out nearly turquoise, and heavy rare earths come out with it. #FriendsOfCoal

Labor Day weekend brings two block parties to the coalfields. PossumFest takes over downtown Cumberland September 4th and 5th, free, ten to eight both days. Up in Letcher County, Isom Days runs the same weekend. #FriendsOfCoal

Coal does not only make electricity and steel. Run it through a chemical plant and it becomes methanol, then olefins, then the polyethylene and polypropylene in packaging and pipe — plus fertilizer and coal tar pitch. #FriendsOfCoal

Coal shows up when it gets hot. On a July afternoon the eastern grid was carrying 168,158 megawatts, with nearly 19,000 megawatts of generation down for repairs. Coal-fired output jumped from 14 gigawatts to 24. #FriendsOfCoal