Everything about Aberfan Disaster totally explained
Aberfan (
X-SAMPA:
, approximately
abervan) is a small
village five miles (8 km) south of
Merthyr Tydfil in
South Wales,
United Kingdom.
Aberfan disaster
On Friday,
October 21,
1966, at 09:15, colliery waste tip number 7 (containing unwanted rock from the local
mine)
slid down Merthyr Mountain. As it collapsed, it destroyed 20 houses and a farm before going on to demolish virtually all of
Pantglas Junior School and part of the separate senior school. The pupils had just left the assembly hall, where they'd been singing "
All Things Bright and Beautiful", when a great noise was heard outside. Had they left for their classrooms a few minutes later, the loss of life would have been significantly greater, as the classrooms were on the side of the building nearest the landslide.
In total, 144 people were killed, 116 of whom were children, most of them between the ages of 7 and 10. Five teachers were also killed in the accident. Only a handful of children were rescued from the rubble.
Lord Robens of Woldingham, chairman of the
National Coal Board (NCB), didn't rush to the scene; he instead went to accept an appointment as chancellor of the
University of Surrey. Subsequently, he controversially claimed that nothing could have been done to prevent the slide.
At the
Tribunal of Inquiry into the Aberfan Disaster, the NCB was found responsible for the disaster, due to "ignorance, ineptitude and a failure of communication". The collapse was found to have been caused by a build-up of water in the pile and, when a small
rotational slip occurred, the disturbance caused the saturated, fine material of the tip to liquefy (
thixotropy) and flow down the mountain. In 1958, the tip had been sited on a known stream (as shown on earlier
Ordnance Survey maps) and had previously suffered several minor slips. Its instability was known, both to colliery management and to tip workers, but very little was done about it. Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council and the
National Union of Mineworkers were cleared of any wrongdoing. No NCB employee was fired, demoted or even disciplined.
The NCB was ordered to pay compensation to the families at the rate of
£500 per child.
After lengthy appeals, part of the fund was used to make the remainder of the waste tip safe and the Coal Board avoided the costs of doing the whole job from its own resources. The Labour government paid back the £150,000 in 1997, although taking account of inflation this should have been £1.5M.
Merthyr Vale Colliery was closed in
1989.
In February 2007 the
Welsh Assembly announced the donation of £2M to the Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund, in part as recompense for the money requisitioned by the government in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
Precognition
London psychiatrist John Barker collected details of over 70 apparent predictions of the disaster, mostly in dreams, that people from Aberfan and elsewhere had had prior to it. Of these 24 were corroborated, and some had been from children who were subsequently killed in the disaster.
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