“I was shocked ... they had to cut that many positions,” said JD Dietsche, 47, a coal miner at Buckskin who also worked at the neighboring Eagle Butte mine until it shut down and changed ownership last year.

He wasn’t subject to Buckskin’s recent wave of layoffs but said the loss of so many workers at the mine would be a big adjustment.

“It doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but those crews are like 25 or 26 people, so (this) was a big hit,” he said.

Despite the slump in coal production basin-wide, Buckskin’s performance has been an outlier. Coal production at the mine increased by over 30 percent between 2018 and 2019. Over the same period, the number of workers employed climbed by 24 percent.

For most of the basin, employment reductions have not kept pace with the deteriorating desire for coal. Amid waning demand, productivity at most Powder River Basin mines has been falling too, analysis by University of Wyoming economist Rob Godby found. In other words, the average output of coal per employee has been declining overall.

The announcement from Buckskin comes on the heels of another layoff in the Powder River Basin. Peabody Energy laid off 50 temporary workers at its North Antelope Rochelle Mine on March 5.