Tom Rathbun Quotations

For a long time, the entire nation depended on coal, limestone, iron ore and steel from Pennsylvania. It helped win the Revolutionary War, it built railroads that opened the West and rebuilt Europe after two world wars. Our take on this is that this is not Pennsylvania's abandoned mine problem, it's America's problem.

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.

The supervisors and FROST requested a meeting with us when we neared the end of the process.

The supervisors and FROST had requested a private meeting at the end of the review process to discuss what was going to be in the permit. We were doing what we were asked to do. If we had known the trouble this would cause, we wouldn't have done it that way.

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.

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.

Everyone said there's nothing you can do about it. Now people are finding out you can.

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.

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.

We welcome any independent review of what we do.