[Old School]

[quote=Coach_Owens87]_____________________________________________________

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Old school, you're not understanding what I've been saying. I never said running sewage into a stream wasn't a problem, just that it's not as bad now as it used to be. Coal companies need to take responsibility for the damages they cause.

I know land must be reclaimed, Ive stated that. We can argue all day about that, all ive ever tried to state is that something needs to be done to make coal companies obey all the laws, which doesn't really matter now that George Bush changed the clean water act by changing the meaning of what can be dumped into streams.

Im not an idiot, I understand the law youre explaining to me, but youre being the stubborn one. You know as well as I do that all coal companies do not follow the laws. If they did, no one would complain. There's so many loopholes around the laws you speak of that it is very easy to get by with things.

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Have you ever heard of the Code of Federal Regulations or otherwise known as CFR-30, if not it is a book that list all of the Federal laws and guidelines for coal mining. The CFR-30 contains over 700 pages of laws and guidelines, this does not include the States Regulations which in West Virginia contains over 300 pages of it's own laws and guidelines, if you combine both Federal and State that makes over 1,000 pages of laws to follow. Now you want Coal Companies to obey all of these laws, do you know of anyone that can obey that many laws, because I sure don't, I think the majority of the companys try to do their very best to stay within the guide lines.
Here's a few examples of the laws:
1) Road berms are to be half the height of the tallest wheel on the operation, lets say that would require a 4' high berm now you have 10 miles of haul roads on the property, if anywhere along this 10 mile streach of road the berm was to be less than the approved 4' height even 3'10" would be a violation, if there were 5 such places that would be 5 violations.
2)Trees and Tree Stumps are not allowed in the hollow fill area, so a inspector finds a 8' log or a tree stump in the hollow fill area, that's a violation.
These are just two of the laws that we have to go by, Keep in mind I not making lite of any law, I know they are there for a reason, but when there are over one thousand laws it is easy to see how some like these can be overlooked.

Why is it that streams can be filled in to build roads and that's ok, contractors can build shopping centers and fill in streams and thats ok, just last week the State Highway Department moved a backhoe (that's on tracks) and a small bull dozier into the creek in front of my house and worked for 3 days and that's ok. I personally don't have a problem with any of the above. But if a Coal Company were to get into the creek we would receive fines and violations. Why is there a double standard, if a Coal Company can't fill in a small stream (majority of which only flow when it rains) for a hollow fill, no one should be able to fill in streams?