Projections indicate that several areas in West Virginia are facing the very real possibility of population death.
Particularly in areas where the dying coal industry was big business, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia is predicting residents will flee in droves over the next decade.
McDowell County used to be the biggest producer of coal in the world, and now may lose up to 32% of its population by 2040, Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
“There were 19,111 people living in McDowell County in 2020, when the US Census was last taken. Hamilton Lombard, who leads the center’s demographic research group, believes there will be only 13,037 people by 2040,” the article reads.
The decline has already begun, as people are likely moving in an attempt to find work.
“The county’s numbers have already fallen to just above 17,000 as of 2024. It’s a far cry from the population of around 100,000 that the county had in the 1950s at the height of the coal boom,” the report continues.
In the years of 2019 and 2020, the county actually saw more deaths than births, with 638 people passing away and just 339 being born. This is not good news for the aging population or for the future of the county.
“There are really only a few other places in the country that are higher than that. Most of them are retirement communities, and McDowell County is not anything like a retirement community in Florida,” said Lombard.
“If you get past a certain age, you’re more likely to die than have a child, would be the crude way of putting it,” he added. “That’ll make it very hard to grow, because even if you’re attracting people, which McDowell County isn’t, you’ve got to attract enough people every single year to make up for that deficit, and that’s just very hard to do.”
In addition to the dwindling coal industry being the result of pushes toward cleaner, greener energy, the opioid epidemic also became a significant problem in the state. During 2013, “opioid overdoses became the leading cause of death for West Virginians under the age of 45,” DM reported.
“If you look at McDowell County back in 1980, it had a younger population than Washington, DC. It was one of the younger counties in the country,” Lombard explained. “Today, the median age there is 44, and in Washington, DC it is 34. It’s growing far older than DC just by losing so many young adults.”
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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