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53 years ago, today, 116 children and 28 adults died in the Aberfan (Wales) disaster.
As the granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and beyond, of Welsh coal miners, this anniversary strikes at my soul. From Wikipedia:
The Aberfan disaster was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip at around 9:15 am on 21 October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed the local junior school and other buildings. The tip was the responsibility of the National Coal Board (NCB), and the subsequent inquiry placed the blame for the disaster on the organisation and nine named employees.
There were seven spoil tips on the slopes above Aberfan; Tip 7—the one that slipped onto the village—was begun in 1958 and, at the time of the disaster, was 111 feet (34 m) high. In contravention of the NCB's official procedures, the tip was partly based on ground from which water springs emerged. After three weeks of heavy rain the tip was saturated and approximately 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of spoil slipped down the side of the hill and onto the Pantglas area of the village. The main building hit was Pantglas Junior School, where lessons had just begun; 5 teachers and 109 children were killed in the school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
7 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Here's the content of my now-deleted OP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
Aberfan in the days immediately after the disaster, showing the extent of the spoil slip
The Aberfan disaster was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip at around 9:15 am on 21 October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed the local junior school and other buildings. The tip was the responsibility of the National Coal Board (NCB), and the subsequent inquiry placed the blame for the disaster on the organisation and nine named employees.
There were seven spoil tips on the slopes above Aberfan; Tip 7—the one that slipped onto the village—was begun in 1958 and, at the time of the disaster, was 111 feet (34 m) high. In contravention of the NCB's official procedures, the tip was partly based on ground from which water springs emerged. After three weeks of heavy rain the tip was saturated and approximately 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of spoil slipped down the side of the hill and onto the Pantglas area of the village. The main building hit was Pantglas Junior School, where lessons had just begun; 5 teachers and 109 children were killed in the school.
An official inquiry was chaired by Lord Justice Edmund Davies. The report placed the blame squarely on the NCB. The organisation's chairman, Lord Robens, was criticised for making misleading statements and for not providing clarity as to the NCB's knowledge of the presence of water springs on the hillside. Neither the NCB nor any of its employees were prosecuted and the organisation was not fined.
The Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund (ADMF) was set up on the day of the disaster. It received nearly 88,000 contributions, totalling £1.75 million. The remaining tips were removed only after a lengthy fight by Aberfan residents, against resistance from the NCB and the government on the grounds of cost. Clearing was paid for by a government grant and a forced contribution of £150,000 taken from the memorial fund. In 1997 the British government paid back the £150,000 to the ADMF, and in 2007 the Welsh Assembly donated £1.5 million to the fund and £500,000 to the Aberfan Education Charity as recompense for the money wrongly taken. Many of the village's residents suffered medical problems, and half the survivors have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder at some time in their lives.
<snip>
Tip collapse
During the first three weeks of October 1966 there was 6.5 inches (170 mm) of rainfall, nearly half of which was in the third week. During the night of 20–21 October the peak of Tip 7 subsided by 9–10 feet (2.7–3.0 m) and the rails on which the spoil was transported to the top of the tip fell into the resulting hole. The spoil movement was discovered at 7:30 am by the first members of the morning shift manning the heaps. One of the workers walked to the colliery to report the slip; he returned with the supervisor for the tips, and it was decided that no further work would be done that day, but that a new tipping position would be decided on the following week.
Map from the 1967 inquiry report, showing the extent of the spoil spill (stippled, within dotted lines)
At 9:15 am a significant amount of water-saturated debris broke away from tip 7 and flowed downhill at 11–21 miles per hour (18–34 km/h) in waves 20–30 feet (6.1–9.1 m) high. G. M. J. Williams, a consultant engineer who gave evidence at the subsequent tribunal, stated that the 9:15 am movement:
Approximately 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of spoil slid 700 yards (640 m) down the mountain, destroying two farm cottages and killing the occupants. Around 50,000 cubic yards (38,000 m3) travelled across the canal and railway embankment and into the village. The flow destroyed two water mains buried in the embankment and the additional water further saturated the spoil. Those who heard the avalanche said the sound reminded them of a low-flying jet or thunder.
The avalanche struck Pantglas Junior School on Moy Road, demolishing and engulfing much of the structure and filling classrooms with thick mud, sludge and rubble; 109 children were killed in the school, from 240 attendees, and five teachers. The pupils of Pantglas Junior School had arrived only minutes earlier for the last day before the half-term holiday, which was due to start at 12.00 pm. The teachers had just begun to record the children's attendance in the registers when the landslide hit. The adjacent secondary school was also damaged, and 18 houses on surrounding roads were destroyed. Mud and water from the slide flooded other houses in the vicinity, forcing many to evacuate their homes. Once the slide material had come to a halt, it re-solidified.[d] A huge mound of slurry up to 30 feet (9.1 m) high blocked the area. The acting headmaster of the secondary school recalled:
The Girls' Entrance [of the secondary school] was approximately two-thirds to three-quarters full of rubble and waste material ... I climbed onto the rubble in the doorway ... when I looked directly in front of me ... I saw that the houses in Moy Road had vanished in a mass of tip-waste material and that the Junior School gable-ends, or part of the roof, were sticking up out of this morass. I looked down to my right and I saw that the Moy Road houses had gone.
Some staff died trying to protect the children. Nansi Williams, the school meals clerk, used her body to shield five children, who all survived; Williams did not, and was found by rescuers still holding a pound note she had been collecting as lunch money. Dai Benyon, the deputy headmaster, tried to use a blackboard to shield himself and five children from the slurry pouring through the school. He and all 34 pupils in his class were killed. When the avalanche stopped, so did the noise; one resident recalled that "in that silence you couldn't hear a bird or a child".
Rescue efforts and retrieval of the bodies
After the landslide stopped, local residents rushed to the school and began digging through the rubble, moving material by hand or with garden tools. At 9:25 am Merthyr Tydfil police received a phone call from a local resident who said "I have been asked to inform that there has been a landslide at Pantglas. The tip has come down on the school"; the fire brigade, based in Merthyr Tydfil, received a call at about the same time. Calls were then made to local hospitals, the ambulance service and the local Civil Defence Corps. The first miners from the Aberfan colliery arrived within 20 minutes of the disaster, having been raised from the coal seams where they had been working. They directed the early digging, knowing that unplanned excavation could lead to collapse of the spoil and the remnants of the buildings; they worked in organised groups under the control of their pit managers.
The first casualties from the wreckage of the school arrived at St Tydfil's Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil at 9:50 am; the remaining rescued casualties all arrived before 11:00 am: 22 children, one of whom was dead on arrival, and 5 adults. A further 9 casualties were sent to the East Glamorgan General Hospital. No survivors were found after 11:00 am. Of the 144 people who died in the disaster, 116 were children, mostly between the ages of 7 and 10; 109 of the children died inside Pantglas Junior School. Five of the adults who died were teachers at the school. An additional 6 adults and 29 children were injured.
The 10:30 am BBC news summary led with the story of the accident. The result was that thousands of volunteers travelled to Aberfan to help, although their efforts often hampered the work of the experienced miners or trained rescue teams.
With the two broken water mains still pumping water into the spoil in Aberfan, the slip continued to move through the village, and it was not until 11:30 am that the water authorities managed to turn off the supply. It was estimated that the mains added between 2 and 3 million imperial gallons (9–14 million litres) of water to the spoil slurry. With movement in the upper slopes still a danger, at 12:00 noon NCB engineers began digging a drainage channel, with the aim of stabilising the tip. It took two hours to reroute the water to a safer place, from where it was diverted into an existing water course.
An NCB board meeting that morning, headed by the organisation's chairman, Lord Robens, was informed of the disaster. It was decided that the company's Director-General of Production and its Chief Safety Engineer should inspect the situation, and they left for the village immediately. In his autobiography, Robens stated that the decision for him not to go was because "the appearance of a layman at too early a stage inevitably distracts senior and essential people from the tasks upon which they should be exclusively concentrating". Instead of visiting the scene, that evening Robens went to the ceremony to invest him as the chancellor of the University of Surrey. NCB officers covered up for him when contacted by Cledwyn Hughes, the Secretary of State for Wales, falsely claiming that Robens was personally directing relief work.
Hughes visited the scene at 4:00 pm for an hour. He telephoned Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, and confirmed Wilson's own thought that he should also visit. Wilson told Hughes to "take whatever action he thought necessary, irrespective of any considerations of 'normal procedures', expenditure or statutory limitations". Wilson arrived at Aberfan at 9.40 pm, where he heard reports from the police and civil defence forces, and visited the rescue workers. Before he left, at midnight, he and Hughes agreed that a high-level independent inquiry needed to be held. That evening the mayor of Merthyr Tydfil launched an appeal for financial donations—soon formally named the Aberfan Disaster Fund—to alleviate financial hardship and to help rebuild the area.
A makeshift mortuary was set up in the village's Bethania Chapel on 21 October and operated until 4 November, 250 yards (229 m) from the disaster site; members of the South Wales Police force assisted with the identification and registration of the victims. Two doctors examined the bodies and issued death certificates; the cause of death was typically asphyxia, fractured skull or multiple crush injuries. Cramped conditions in the chapel meant that parents could only be admitted one at a time to identify the bodies of their children. The building also acted as a missing persons bureau and its vestry was used by Red Cross volunteers and St John Ambulance stretcher-bearers. Four hundred embalmers volunteered to assist with the cleaning and dressing of the corpses; a contingent that flew over from Northern Ireland removed the seats of their plane to transport child-sized coffins. The smaller Aberfan Calvinistic Chapel nearby was used as a second mortuary from 22 to 29 October.
By the morning of Saturday 22 October, 111 bodies had been excavated, of which 51 had been identified. At daybreak the Queen's brother-in-law Lord Snowdon visited and spoke with workers and parents; at 11:00 am Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, visited the scene and talked to rescue workers. In the early afternoon light rain began falling, which became increasingly heavy; it caused further movement in the tip, which threatened the rescue work and raised the possibility that the area would have to be evacuated.
Robens arrived in Aberfan on Saturday evening. After visiting the colliery and the disaster site, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the NCB would work with any public inquiry. In an interview with The Observer, Robens said the organisation "will not seek to hide behind any legal loophole or make any legal quibble about responsibility". Robens returned to the village the following morning to see the situation in daylight. He was interviewed by a television news team while examining the tip. When asked about the responsibility of the NCB for the slide, he answered:
The white arches in Bryntaf Cemetery, Aberfan, which mark the graves of children killed in the disaster.
On 23 October assistance was provided by the Territorial Army. This was followed by the arrival of naval ratings from HMS Tiger and members of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment. That day Wilson announced the appointment of Lord Justice Edmund Davies as the chairman of the inquiry into the disaster; Davies had been born and schooled in the nearby village of Mountain Ash. A coroner's inquest was opened on 24 October to give the causes of death for 30 of the children located. One man who lost his wife and two sons called out when he heard their names mentioned: "No, sir—buried alive by the National Coal Board"; one woman shouted that the NCB had "killed our children". The first funerals, for five of the children, took place the following day. A mass funeral for 81 children and one woman took place at Bryntaf Cemetery in Aberfan on 27 October. They were buried in a pair of 80-foot-long (24 m) trenches; 10,000 people attended.
Because of the vast quantity and consistency of the spoil, it was a week before all the bodies were recovered; the last victim was found on 28 October. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Aberfan on 29 October to pay their respects to those who had died. Their visit coincided with the end of the main rescue phase; only one contracting firm remained in the village to continue the last stages of the clear-up.
</snip>
Aberfan in the days immediately after the disaster, showing the extent of the spoil slip
The Aberfan disaster was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip at around 9:15 am on 21 October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed the local junior school and other buildings. The tip was the responsibility of the National Coal Board (NCB), and the subsequent inquiry placed the blame for the disaster on the organisation and nine named employees.
There were seven spoil tips on the slopes above Aberfan; Tip 7—the one that slipped onto the village—was begun in 1958 and, at the time of the disaster, was 111 feet (34 m) high. In contravention of the NCB's official procedures, the tip was partly based on ground from which water springs emerged. After three weeks of heavy rain the tip was saturated and approximately 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of spoil slipped down the side of the hill and onto the Pantglas area of the village. The main building hit was Pantglas Junior School, where lessons had just begun; 5 teachers and 109 children were killed in the school.
An official inquiry was chaired by Lord Justice Edmund Davies. The report placed the blame squarely on the NCB. The organisation's chairman, Lord Robens, was criticised for making misleading statements and for not providing clarity as to the NCB's knowledge of the presence of water springs on the hillside. Neither the NCB nor any of its employees were prosecuted and the organisation was not fined.
The Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund (ADMF) was set up on the day of the disaster. It received nearly 88,000 contributions, totalling £1.75 million. The remaining tips were removed only after a lengthy fight by Aberfan residents, against resistance from the NCB and the government on the grounds of cost. Clearing was paid for by a government grant and a forced contribution of £150,000 taken from the memorial fund. In 1997 the British government paid back the £150,000 to the ADMF, and in 2007 the Welsh Assembly donated £1.5 million to the fund and £500,000 to the Aberfan Education Charity as recompense for the money wrongly taken. Many of the village's residents suffered medical problems, and half the survivors have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder at some time in their lives.
<snip>
Tip collapse
During the first three weeks of October 1966 there was 6.5 inches (170 mm) of rainfall, nearly half of which was in the third week. During the night of 20–21 October the peak of Tip 7 subsided by 9–10 feet (2.7–3.0 m) and the rails on which the spoil was transported to the top of the tip fell into the resulting hole. The spoil movement was discovered at 7:30 am by the first members of the morning shift manning the heaps. One of the workers walked to the colliery to report the slip; he returned with the supervisor for the tips, and it was decided that no further work would be done that day, but that a new tipping position would be decided on the following week.
Map from the 1967 inquiry report, showing the extent of the spoil spill (stippled, within dotted lines)
At 9:15 am a significant amount of water-saturated debris broke away from tip 7 and flowed downhill at 11–21 miles per hour (18–34 km/h) in waves 20–30 feet (6.1–9.1 m) high. G. M. J. Williams, a consultant engineer who gave evidence at the subsequent tribunal, stated that the 9:15 am movement:
took part of the saturated material past the point where liquefaction occurred. This initially liquefied material began to move rapidly, releasing energy which liquefied the rest of the saturated portion of the tip, and almost instantaneously the nature of the saturated lower parts of Tip No. 7 was changed from that of a solid to that of a heavy liquid of a density of approximately twice that of water. This was 'the dark glistening wave' which several witnesses saw burst from the bottom of the tip.
Approximately 140,000 cubic yards (110,000 m3) of spoil slid 700 yards (640 m) down the mountain, destroying two farm cottages and killing the occupants. Around 50,000 cubic yards (38,000 m3) travelled across the canal and railway embankment and into the village. The flow destroyed two water mains buried in the embankment and the additional water further saturated the spoil. Those who heard the avalanche said the sound reminded them of a low-flying jet or thunder.
The avalanche struck Pantglas Junior School on Moy Road, demolishing and engulfing much of the structure and filling classrooms with thick mud, sludge and rubble; 109 children were killed in the school, from 240 attendees, and five teachers. The pupils of Pantglas Junior School had arrived only minutes earlier for the last day before the half-term holiday, which was due to start at 12.00 pm. The teachers had just begun to record the children's attendance in the registers when the landslide hit. The adjacent secondary school was also damaged, and 18 houses on surrounding roads were destroyed. Mud and water from the slide flooded other houses in the vicinity, forcing many to evacuate their homes. Once the slide material had come to a halt, it re-solidified.[d] A huge mound of slurry up to 30 feet (9.1 m) high blocked the area. The acting headmaster of the secondary school recalled:
The Girls' Entrance [of the secondary school] was approximately two-thirds to three-quarters full of rubble and waste material ... I climbed onto the rubble in the doorway ... when I looked directly in front of me ... I saw that the houses in Moy Road had vanished in a mass of tip-waste material and that the Junior School gable-ends, or part of the roof, were sticking up out of this morass. I looked down to my right and I saw that the Moy Road houses had gone.
Some staff died trying to protect the children. Nansi Williams, the school meals clerk, used her body to shield five children, who all survived; Williams did not, and was found by rescuers still holding a pound note she had been collecting as lunch money. Dai Benyon, the deputy headmaster, tried to use a blackboard to shield himself and five children from the slurry pouring through the school. He and all 34 pupils in his class were killed. When the avalanche stopped, so did the noise; one resident recalled that "in that silence you couldn't hear a bird or a child".
Rescue efforts and retrieval of the bodies
After the landslide stopped, local residents rushed to the school and began digging through the rubble, moving material by hand or with garden tools. At 9:25 am Merthyr Tydfil police received a phone call from a local resident who said "I have been asked to inform that there has been a landslide at Pantglas. The tip has come down on the school"; the fire brigade, based in Merthyr Tydfil, received a call at about the same time. Calls were then made to local hospitals, the ambulance service and the local Civil Defence Corps. The first miners from the Aberfan colliery arrived within 20 minutes of the disaster, having been raised from the coal seams where they had been working. They directed the early digging, knowing that unplanned excavation could lead to collapse of the spoil and the remnants of the buildings; they worked in organised groups under the control of their pit managers.
The first casualties from the wreckage of the school arrived at St Tydfil's Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil at 9:50 am; the remaining rescued casualties all arrived before 11:00 am: 22 children, one of whom was dead on arrival, and 5 adults. A further 9 casualties were sent to the East Glamorgan General Hospital. No survivors were found after 11:00 am. Of the 144 people who died in the disaster, 116 were children, mostly between the ages of 7 and 10; 109 of the children died inside Pantglas Junior School. Five of the adults who died were teachers at the school. An additional 6 adults and 29 children were injured.
The 10:30 am BBC news summary led with the story of the accident. The result was that thousands of volunteers travelled to Aberfan to help, although their efforts often hampered the work of the experienced miners or trained rescue teams.
With the two broken water mains still pumping water into the spoil in Aberfan, the slip continued to move through the village, and it was not until 11:30 am that the water authorities managed to turn off the supply. It was estimated that the mains added between 2 and 3 million imperial gallons (9–14 million litres) of water to the spoil slurry. With movement in the upper slopes still a danger, at 12:00 noon NCB engineers began digging a drainage channel, with the aim of stabilising the tip. It took two hours to reroute the water to a safer place, from where it was diverted into an existing water course.
An NCB board meeting that morning, headed by the organisation's chairman, Lord Robens, was informed of the disaster. It was decided that the company's Director-General of Production and its Chief Safety Engineer should inspect the situation, and they left for the village immediately. In his autobiography, Robens stated that the decision for him not to go was because "the appearance of a layman at too early a stage inevitably distracts senior and essential people from the tasks upon which they should be exclusively concentrating". Instead of visiting the scene, that evening Robens went to the ceremony to invest him as the chancellor of the University of Surrey. NCB officers covered up for him when contacted by Cledwyn Hughes, the Secretary of State for Wales, falsely claiming that Robens was personally directing relief work.
Hughes visited the scene at 4:00 pm for an hour. He telephoned Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, and confirmed Wilson's own thought that he should also visit. Wilson told Hughes to "take whatever action he thought necessary, irrespective of any considerations of 'normal procedures', expenditure or statutory limitations". Wilson arrived at Aberfan at 9.40 pm, where he heard reports from the police and civil defence forces, and visited the rescue workers. Before he left, at midnight, he and Hughes agreed that a high-level independent inquiry needed to be held. That evening the mayor of Merthyr Tydfil launched an appeal for financial donations—soon formally named the Aberfan Disaster Fund—to alleviate financial hardship and to help rebuild the area.
A makeshift mortuary was set up in the village's Bethania Chapel on 21 October and operated until 4 November, 250 yards (229 m) from the disaster site; members of the South Wales Police force assisted with the identification and registration of the victims. Two doctors examined the bodies and issued death certificates; the cause of death was typically asphyxia, fractured skull or multiple crush injuries. Cramped conditions in the chapel meant that parents could only be admitted one at a time to identify the bodies of their children. The building also acted as a missing persons bureau and its vestry was used by Red Cross volunteers and St John Ambulance stretcher-bearers. Four hundred embalmers volunteered to assist with the cleaning and dressing of the corpses; a contingent that flew over from Northern Ireland removed the seats of their plane to transport child-sized coffins. The smaller Aberfan Calvinistic Chapel nearby was used as a second mortuary from 22 to 29 October.
By the morning of Saturday 22 October, 111 bodies had been excavated, of which 51 had been identified. At daybreak the Queen's brother-in-law Lord Snowdon visited and spoke with workers and parents; at 11:00 am Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, visited the scene and talked to rescue workers. In the early afternoon light rain began falling, which became increasingly heavy; it caused further movement in the tip, which threatened the rescue work and raised the possibility that the area would have to be evacuated.
Robens arrived in Aberfan on Saturday evening. After visiting the colliery and the disaster site, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the NCB would work with any public inquiry. In an interview with The Observer, Robens said the organisation "will not seek to hide behind any legal loophole or make any legal quibble about responsibility". Robens returned to the village the following morning to see the situation in daylight. He was interviewed by a television news team while examining the tip. When asked about the responsibility of the NCB for the slide, he answered:
I wouldn't have thought myself that anybody would know that there was a spring deep in the heart of a mountain, any more than I can tell you there is one under our feet where we are now. If you are asking me did any of my people on the spot know that there was this spring water, then the answer is, No—they couldn't possibly. ... It was impossible to know that there was a spring in the heart of this tip which was turning the centre of the mountain into sludge.
The white arches in Bryntaf Cemetery, Aberfan, which mark the graves of children killed in the disaster.
On 23 October assistance was provided by the Territorial Army. This was followed by the arrival of naval ratings from HMS Tiger and members of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment. That day Wilson announced the appointment of Lord Justice Edmund Davies as the chairman of the inquiry into the disaster; Davies had been born and schooled in the nearby village of Mountain Ash. A coroner's inquest was opened on 24 October to give the causes of death for 30 of the children located. One man who lost his wife and two sons called out when he heard their names mentioned: "No, sir—buried alive by the National Coal Board"; one woman shouted that the NCB had "killed our children". The first funerals, for five of the children, took place the following day. A mass funeral for 81 children and one woman took place at Bryntaf Cemetery in Aberfan on 27 October. They were buried in a pair of 80-foot-long (24 m) trenches; 10,000 people attended.
Because of the vast quantity and consistency of the spoil, it was a week before all the bodies were recovered; the last victim was found on 28 October. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Aberfan on 29 October to pay their respects to those who had died. Their visit coincided with the end of the main rescue phase; only one contracting firm remained in the village to continue the last stages of the clear-up.
</snip>
