Tom Rathbun
Tom Rathbun
filled kid lined mountain orange rivers trees
Mountain streams and rivers that were orange when I was a kid are now filled with fish, are now lined with trees and rhododendrons, and that's progress.
awful looking people problem solution time
There are an awful lot of people that have put time into making this happen, people who aren't looking at the problem and complaining, but looking for a solution to the problem.
clean creating good material money soon taxpayers
You have a material that can be used as fuel. As soon as you get the material out of the stream, it (the stream) improves. If we can clean streams while creating electricity, and it's not costing the taxpayers any money to clean up these streams, that's a good thing.
review welcome
We welcome any independent review of what we do.
accident habits happen learn mining repeat sure work
Mining is dangerous, but it is work habits that make it unsafe. When there's an accident you need to learn from it, so you can make sure it doesn't happen again. You learn from the accident so it doesn't repeat itself.
amended bigger concern despite management several
Management was a bigger concern to us than the finances. The reclamation just wasn't being done despite several amended agreements.
mining money touch work
We need something that's going to work for the Appalachian states; any place there was mining before the 1970s, there's a real need for reclamation. And that money still only cleans up higher-priority sites; it doesn't even touch on all the non-coal quarries in need of reclamation.
appreciate based bias faces industry mining modern
I think they appreciate that; our modern mining industry sometimes faces a lot of anti-mining bias based on things that were done in the past.
meets mining needs permanent state
What we want is to find a more permanent arrangement, a long-term reauthorization (of the fund) that meets the needs of a state with our mining history.
site work
Work at that site has just come to a standstill.
addressing continue federal looking money wait
We're not going to wait around for federal money to continue addressing these problems. We're looking at other options.
companies obsolete order paid spend
We don't want to order these companies to spend $100,000 on something that's going to be obsolete before it's paid for.
government groups hands job local open sitting smaller solutions state waiting
We're not sitting on our hands waiting for someone to hand us money. With smaller watershed groups and state and local government being open to new ideas, our job is to see that other solutions are being put into practice.
falls roof
When a roof falls from 40 feet, it's going to be catastrophic.