"Ohio River Towboat Captain Navigates A Changing America"

"In the 29 years that towboat captain Joe Gray has worked flotillas of barges up and down the Ohio River, he has witnessed the decline at the heart of industrial America in what is known as the country’s Rust Belt.

Gray, 46, spends up to eight months a year doing 28-day stints on the barges carrying coal, corn and gravel between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cairo, Illinois. Some 600 million tons of goods still flow each year along 25,000 miles of U.S. waterways.

But he has seen a growing number of coal-fired power plants being dismantled, from Indiana to West Virginia, and says barges loaded with coal have dwindled in the face of cheaper natural gas and tougher environmental regulations."

Chris Kenning reports for Reuters December 5, 2017.