Tom Rathbun Mining Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.