150 feared lost in Welsh landslip

From Denis Frost
22 October 1966

Aberfan, Glamorgan
About 150 people, including a “whole generation” of schoolchildren, are missing or dead after the landslip disaster here yesterday. It happened when an avalanche of pit waste slid down a mountainside and engulfed a school and houses in this mining village six miles from Merthyr Tydfil. Early today 75 bodies had been recovered from the school. Seven were adults, the rest children between five and 11 years old. Last night Mr John Beale, the director of education for Merthyr, estimated that about 60 children were still missing; 36 were in hospital, two had been discharged, and 98 had come from the school alive. Four teachers had been killed and five were safe. It is feared that more bodies will be found in a row of cottages which was also buried.

It was 9.15 and the school had just finished morning prayers when the million tons of coal waste, rocks, and water crumpled 800 feet down the Aberfan mountain. The children were due to start their week’s half-term holiday at noon.

But many children never reached school at all. Fog delayed a busload of 50 seniors and Ninon from the village of Mount Pleasant nearby. Some decided to walk – and arrived late enough to miss the landfall. Pantlas secondary school – a senior school with 200 pupils – is only 100 yards or so from the junior building but was hardly touched. A row of six cottages between the schools was buried, however, and a farmhouse farther up the mountain was swept away. Minutes before, the woman who lived there had taken her five children into Mountain Ash on a shopping trip.
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A whistle and a shout, ‘Quiet!’ then all stops

By Tony Geraghty
22 October 1966

In the semi-darkness, the front of the school looks in not too bad a shape, it is when you pass through the school gates into the mud and clinker that covers what once was the playground that the full magnitude and near hopelessness of what has happened hits you.

The back of the school, which once faced uphill, has been smashed and laid bare as if the foot of some careless giant had crushed it. The gable ends of the budding are all that is above ground level. Below them the classrooms, or some of them, have been cleared of rubble and light shone into them. From the mound behind the school, these rooms full of old and young men digging furiously, a priest standing among them, have the air of a fairy cavern.

Silent hall
But in spite of appearances, there are other signs that there is nothing hallucinatory about what has happened in Merthyr. The air is thick with dust for a mile around and blindingly light. The night buzzes with the roar of half a dozen mechanical excavators, some of which dig individual holes at sensitive spots, foraging mechanical arms into the ground in search of life. So many tracked vehicles have moved in here that the ground shifts and changes by the minute and rescue workers, streaming sweat stumble like moles in the daylight bumping into one another.

All the noise and activity gradually dies in response to a police whistle. “Quiet, please!” roars a police sergeant in a voice that must dominate his choir. “Stop the machines. Stop walking about now, will you.” No explanation is needed. We are all listening for signs of survival somewhere under that beastly, oily black mound. After perhaps a minute’s pause the whistle blows once more. It is the signal to continue digging.
This is an edited extract.

Editorial: Disaster at Aberfan

22 October 1966

How could it happen? A heap of waste, a man-made hill, dissolves in the rain and suddenly engulfs a school. South Wales is a land of slag-heaps. Its people live in their shadow. Why did this one move? The Coal Board must find out, and the answer may not be soothing. Miners are not careless men, but in some way had not foreseen the waste they had piled round Aberfan had become unsafe. South Wales will be a restless place until we know why.

Meanwhile mere words can do nothing to help. The Welsh, who are used to tragedy, have now suffered their worst. The pits themselves do not kill children.

A disaster which overwhelms a school is a disaster of a special type. In 10 minutes a community has lost something like half its children. Their absence will haunt their valley for 60 years to come. No amount of sympathy can fill a gap like that.

There was, though, yesterday an inspiring work of rescue. Which continued through the night. There was no delay, no lack of equipment, no lack of skills or resolution. Against all odds, the rescuers found a few miraculously still alive. The children who died, according to the man in charge of the rescue, died instantly.

There must be now a quick and painstaking inquiry into how such a thing could happen. It must uncover the whole truth and establish blame if blame exists. This disaster was not natural, it was man-made. Aberfan is one of scores of communities in south Wales which huddle at the foot of slag-heaps. It is idle to pretend that an exceptionally wet October could be the only reason for yesterday’s disaster; Wales is accustomed to heavy rain. There must have been other reasons too, connected with the way the heap was built, or was allowed to grow, and the gap that was left between the heap and the village. These are things that can be controlled. There must be a safe way for the Coal Board to get rid of its waste. There must be a way of ensuring that yesterday’s tragedy is not repeated.

Aberfan tip burst like a bubble

By Denis Frost
24 October 1966

National Coal Board specialists are now fairly certain that a mountain spring welling up inside the Aberfan coal tip caused the avalanche that wiped out a generation of schoolchildren here on Friday.

At the latest count, 137 bodies had been taken from the school and from the remains of 11 demolished cottages. More bodies were expected to be recovered from the buried houses.

At the public inquiry, which will be held in Merthyr Tydfil by Lord Justice Edmund Davies, the NCB will be faced with two questions. First, why did they continue tipping coal dust onto a powerful source of water? Second, why, after giving a written assurance to the council in 1964 that tipping at Aberfan would cease, did they change their minds and start again?

Lord Robens, chairman of the NCB, revealed the presence of the spring in a television interview last night. He said: “We have discovered water welling up in the virtual centre of the tip – a natural spring which was completely unknown. This spring has been pouring its water into the centre of the tip producing what an official has described as a water bomb.
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