“The behavior of these executives seems to me pretty outrageous. They could see the handwriting on the wall,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. “The numbers are there. They started paying themselves out way back in 2012 or early 2013 when the numbers were turning.”

The coal industry is hardly alone in offering its executives generous compensation. CEO pay at America’s largest firms grew by 997 percent, adjusting for inflation, between 1978 and 2014, according to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank.

But the nature of the coal industry sets the compensation industry executives received apart, observers say. The mining sector is cyclical. Fortunes rise and fall with commodity prices. And coal executives should have recognized they were entering a metallurgical market at or near its height, critics argue.