At around 7:30am on the 21st of October, 1966, workers arriving at the site of a coal mine near
the village of Aberfan in Wales discovered that one of several spoil heaps on site had shifted
during the night. Supervisors called a halt to any work that day and began to assess the damage.
They were still doing so at 9:15am, when a huge amount of material broke away from
the heap and flowed downhill in a giant wave, directly towards the village below.
The process of coal mining has several by-products. There is the useful product of coal,
a valuable and extremely popular fuel in 1966, and the useless byproduct of spoil,
a combination of earth, gravel, dust, and other materials pulled from the ground during
the mining process. This material is typically piled up away from the entrance to the mine,
forming a distinctive dark conical mound.
The Aberfan colliery had seven spoil tips,
all of which were located uphill from the village, which itself sat in a natural valley.
Spoil tip number seven was the one which slid downhill on the 21st of October 1966. More than
100,000 cubic meters (or 140,000 cubic yards) of spoil formed a dark, glistening wave the height
of a two-storey building that moved downhill at 24 kilometers per hour (or 15 miles per hour).
Instantly, two farm cottages in the path of the slide were
obliterated, their occupants killed outright.
About half the spoil continued to flow across a canal and railway into the village proper,
where it engulfed Pantglass Junior School and destroyed 18 houses.
Many more houses and a secondary school were also severely damaged.
While flowing, the material resembled and behaved like a muddy liquid. Once the movement ceased it
solidified almost instantly. The thunderous noise of the avalanche gave way to an eerie silence.
Shocked residents emerged from nearby houses, observed the destruction and raced to start
digging for survivors with gardening implements and whatever other tools they could find.
At the time of the slide the junior school had just received the majority of its pupils.
240 children in total were inside the building, most aged from 7 to 10 years old.
It was at the site of the school that the initial rescue effort was concentrated.
Emergency services soon arrived on scene, along with miners from the Aberfan colliery,
who used their knowledge and experience of working
with spoil to direct the efforts of emergency personnel and volunteers.
36 casualties were quickly unearthed and sent to two nearby hospitals.
It is of note that all the survivors were freed within the first two
hours of the rescue effort. After 11am, only bodies were found.
In most cases the victims had died of asphyxia, or multiple crushing injuries.
The final death toll came to 144 - 116 of them children.
A makeshift mortuary was set up in a chapel in the village a short distance from the site.
It was a cramped space, but no more fitting one was available.
People were admitted in ones and twos to identify the bodies of their children,
or to record the names of missing persons yet to be identified.
So small was the chapel, and so large the number of bodies, that some parts of the
operation had to set up elsewhere. Death and cremation certificates, for example,
were issued from the next nearest local landmark: a fish and chip shop near the chapel.
The retrieval effort went on day and night for two weeks.
The work of digging through the solidified spoil, already a difficult and dangerous task, was
further complicated by a number of factors. First and foremost, the material would sometimes shift.
The slide had clogged a river, blocked drains, and broken two water mains, meaning that a great
deal of water was constantly infiltrating the slurry and causing it to move. It wasn't until
water was switched off and drainage channels dug that the rescue site became more stable.
Additionally, news coverage of the disaster on the BBC had prompted hundreds of well-meaning
volunteers to travel to Aberfan to lend their assistance. Given the complex nature of the site
their presence more often obstructed rescuers than assisted them. Likewise journalists also
descended on the town. While they didn't directly obstruct the rescue effort, there are many reports
of great insensitivity on their part. One journalist, for example, reportedly asked
a child if they would please cry on camera for their dead sibling, as it would make good TV.
The dead were buried as soon as possible, with a large number being laid to rest
at a mass ceremony. 81 children and one woman were buried in a collective grave at Bryntaf Cemetery
on the 27th of October, with the ceremony attended by tens of thousands.
The Queen visited Aberfan a few days later to meet rescuers and pay her respects to the dead.
While further funerals took place, thoughts had already turned to an inquiry.
A key figure in this was Lord Robens, the head of the National Coal Board (or NCB),
the organization responsible for the colliery. His initial stance was simple. The NCB, he said,
would not "quibble about responsibility", nor try to "hide behind any legal loophole".
They would rather, "cooperate fully to establish what went wrong as quickly as possible."
This turned out to be an empty promise. The mechanism of the slip was quickly established. The
spoil tip had been situated over a natural spring, which effectively pumped water into the spoil.
This, combined with unusually heavy rainfall in the days leading up to the disaster,
was sufficient to turn the spoil from a solid into a slurry,
and begin the slip. There was little debate about the mechanical cause of the incident.
The matter of whether the NCB should have been able to predict that this would happen, however,
was rather more complex. Many said they should have known that a slide was inevitable. After all,
it had happened before. In November 1944 part of tip number four
had slipped and rolled down the hillside, stopping just 150 meters (or 500 feet)
from the village. Several minor slides and slippages were also on record.
At times, residents had corresponded with the NCB,
stating that they were worried about the positioning of spoil tips above Pantglas Junior
School, and complaining that coal residue was blocking drains and causing floods in the village.
Action on these issues was promised but never delivered.
Complainants were prevented from ever becoming too vocal about these issues by the implicit threat of
the mine closing altogether, taking away with it the vast majority of jobs in the local area.
Investigations found that, at the colliery itself, a culture of disregard for above ground
safety had developed. While safety within the mine itself was considered important,
fears surrounding the spoil heaps and above ground operations were dismissed as trivial and invalid.
The real danger, those at the colliery thought, was below ground, not above.
A tribunal ran for 76 days over the course of several months
before finally concluding that the blame lay with the NCB.
This conclusion might have been reached sooner were Lord Robens and the NCB
not so reluctant to be held to account. Indeed the tribunal report stated that
much of the time of the tribunal could have been saved "if the National Coal Board had not
stubbornly resisted every attempt to lay the blame where it so clearly must rest - at their door."
The tribunal found that many factors contributed to the disaster.
Duties had been neglected, complaints swept aside, dangers ignored. Nine employees of
the NCB were singled out by the tribunal, but despite this nobody was charged with a crime,
no punishments were handed out, and nobody was dismissed from their job.
Controversy also surrounded the disaster relief fund
set up in the days following the tragedy to support survivors and the families of the dead.
The fund was not short of donations, but the Charity Commission - a government organization
responsible for regulating charities - prevented the fund from paying out in many cases.
Payments were forbidden where children were traumatized but not physically injured by
the disaster, and the Charity Commission also insisted that the disaster relief fund
ascertained that parents had been "close" to their deceased children before making any payments.
Whether deemed close to their children or not parents were,
initially at least, denied any money to help pay for their childrens' gravestones.
The NCB itself, by way of compensation, initially offered just £50 to the parents
of each child killed by the slide - an amount that would be worth around £900 today.
After much protest they increased this figure 10-fold but resisted any pressure to raise it
further. The working-class families who had lost children, they argued,
would be unable to handle a larger amount of compensation.
While all this was ongoing the slag heaps remained in place,
a clear and present danger to the village and a looming spectre that affected residents terribly.
Repeated pleas for the tips to be moved were ignored.
They would be landscaped instead, the villagers were told. There was no sense in removing them as
they were apparently perfectly safe where they were. The slip had been just a freak accident.
Desperate to be heard several villagers enacted a protest wherein they dumped bags of coal slurry in
the reception area of the UK's Welsh Office. They were immediately and unsympathetically arrested.
In the end money had to be taken from the disaster relief fund to pay for the removal of the
remaining spoil heaps. This process took years, in part because Lord Robens adamantly insisted that
the NCB should not foot the bill. Ultimately, the cost was covered mainly by the government. The NCB
paid only part of the cost, with the balance made up by money taken from the disaster relief fund.
This money was, many years later, repaid by the government,
but without interest, leaving the disaster fund short more than a million pounds.
It wasn't until 2007 that a more proper amount was repaid. The fund continues its work to safeguard
the memorials to the Aberfan Disaster, and to support survivors and the families of victims.
The legacy of the Aberfan Disaster is a long one. In the aftermath, legislation was introduced to
govern the tipping of spoil, thus ensuring that a repeat disaster could not take place.
Countless other changes, both to practical safety
and to the process of holding government bodies to account, have also been enacted since.
The world is now a safer place, and the village of Aberfan has recovered.
It remains nestled in the heart of the valley. The looming spoil tips have been removed, although
the grass where they once stood is forever tinged a sickly yellow colour. Though unremarkable to
a visitor, the residents of Aberfan know exactly where the spoil tips once stood.