Kentucky - The Bluegrass State 2

Kentucky – The Bluegrass State

Kentucky has historically been a major coal producer, but employment by “King Coal” has been in a 30-year decline there, and the number of people employed in the coal industry there dropped by more than half between 2011 and 2015.

As of 2010, 24% of electricity produced in the U.S. depended on either enriched uranium rods coming from the Paducah Gasseous Diffusion Plant, the only domestic site of low grade uranium enrichment, or from the 107,336 tons of coal extracted from the state’s two coal fields.

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Paducah Enrichment Plant

Kentucky produces 95% of the world’s supply of bourbon whiskey, and the number of barrels of bourbon being aged in Kentucky (more than 5.7 million) exceeds the state’s population.  Bourbon has been a growing market – with production of Kentucky bourbon rising 170 percent between 1999 and 2015.

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Bourbon

Kentucky exports reached a record $22.1 billion in 2012, with products and services going to 199 countries.

Transportation:

Kentucky is served by six major interstate highways (I-24, I-64, I-65, I-69, I-71, and I-75), nine parkways, and four bypasses and spurs (I-264, I-265, I-275, and I-471).

The Amtrak Cardinal line offers service to Ashland, South Shore, Maysville and South Portsmouth.  The City of New Orleans line serves Fulton.

Kentucky’s primary airports include Louisville International Airport (Standiford Field (SDF)) of Louisville, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) of Cincinnati/Covington, and Blue Grass Airport (LEX) in Lexington.

Louisville International Airport is home to UPS’s Worldport, its international air-sorting hub.

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Louisville Airport

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is the largest airport in the state, and is a focus city for passenger airline Delta Air Lines and headquarters of its Delta Private Jets. The airport is one of DHL Aviation‘s three super-hubs, serving destinations throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, making it the 7th busiest airport in the U.S. and 36th in the world based on passenger and cargo operations.

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Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport

As the state is bounded by two of the largest rivers in North America, water transportation has historically played a major role in Kentucky’s economy.  Louisville was a major port for steamships in the nineteenth century.  Today, most barge traffic on Kentucky waterways consists of coal that is shipped from both the Eastern and Western Coalfields, about half of which is used locally to power many power plants located directly off the Ohio River, with the rest being exported to other countries, most notably Japan.

Many of the largest ports in the United States are located in or adjacent to Kentucky, including:

  • Huntington-Tristate (includes Ashland, Kentucky), largest inland port and 7th largest overall
  • Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky, 5th largest inland port and 43rd overall
  • Louisville-Southern Indiana, 7th largest inland port and 55th overall

As a state, Kentucky ranks 10th overall in port tonnage.

The Kentucky Flag:

After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Kentucky, as a part of the Commonwealth of Virginia, flew the flag of Virginia. As the war progressed, Louisville and Lexington adopted the “Betsy Ross flag”. The rest of the state followed. After the war ended, the Flag of Virginia was restored for a short period.

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