Remembering the Aberfan disaster
People remember where they where they were when they heard the news of the Aberfan disaster on the morning of 21 October 1966. A tip high above the coal-mining village near Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, had slid down the mountain and slammed into a row of houses and a junior school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
There were seven spoil tips on the slopes above Aberfan. One of them, spoil tip no 7, was 34 metres high. The waste from the colliery had been dumped on ground where natural springs emerged from the mountain, in contravention of National Coal Board (NCB) rules and regulations.
After three weeks of rain the tip was saturated, both from above and below. An estimated 110,000 cubic metres of slurry slipped 700 yards down the slope and buried the school, just as morning lessons were starting. Many of the survivors remember the terrible silence immediately after the avalanche. The half-term holiday was due to start at midday.
The official enquiry placed the blame squarely on the NCB. The organisations chairman, Lord Robens, was criticised for making misleading statements and for not providing clarity as to the NCBs knowledge of the springs under the tip. Rather than visit Aberfan on the day of the disaster, he attended a ceremony to invest him as the chancellor of the University of Surrey, and he had to be invited to attend the official enquiry.
It was the strong and unanimous view of the enquiry that the “Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented”.
The NCB initially offered the bereaved families £50. The NCB as an organisation was not prosecuted and no NCB employee was demoted, sacked or prosecuted, although nine people were censured. Within a few months 88,000 contributions from all over the world had been sent to the Disaster Fund. At one of the inquests later, one man who had lost his wife and two sons called out “No, sir, buried alive by the National Coal Board”.
The headline on the newspaper of the Socialist Labour League, published just after the disaster was “Murder by the NCB”.
Pictures: News Line Archive, copyright of Report Digital