Aberfan disaster

Aberfan (IPA: [aˈbɛrvan]) is a small village five miles (8 km) south of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. The village is chiefly known because of the catastrophic landslide that occurred there in 1966, known as the Aberfan Disaster, which claimed 144 lives, including 116 children.

Aberfan disaster

For approximately 50 years up to to 1966, millions of cubic metres of excavated mining debris from the National Coal Board's Merthyr Vale Colliery was deposited on the side of Merthyr Mountain, directly above the township of Aberfan. Huge piles of loose rock and mining slag, known as tips, had been built up over a layer of highly porous sandstone that contained numerous underground springs, and several tips had been built up directly over these springs. Although local authorities had raised specific concerns in 1963 about slag being tipped on the mountain above the primary school, these were largely ignored by the NCB's area management.

Early on the morning of Friday 21 October 1966, after several days of heavy rain, a subsidence of about 3-6 metres occurred on the upper flank of colliery waste tip No. 7. At 9:15am more than 150,000 cubic metres of water-saturated debris broke away and flowed downhill at high speed. It was sunny on the mountain but still foggy in the village, with visibility only about fifty metres. The tipping gang working on the mountain saw the landslide start, but were unable to raise the alarm because their telephone cable had been repeatedly stolen (although the official inquiry into the disaster later established that the slip happened so fast that a telephone warning would not have saved any lives).

The front part of the mass became liquefied and moved as a series of viscous surges down the slope at high speed. 120,000 cubic metres of debris were deposited on the lower slopes of the mountain but a mass of over 40,000 cubic metres of debris weighing half a million tonnes smashed into the village in a slurry some 12 metres (40 feet) deep. The slide smashed through 20 terrace houses and a farm before slamming into the northern side of the Pantglas Junior School and part of the separate senior school, demolishing most of the buildings and covering the ruins under a thick layer mud and rubble up to 10 metres (30 feet) thick.

The pupils had arrived only minutes earlier for the last day of term. They had just left the assembly hall, where they had 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 reduced, as the classrooms were on the side of the building nearest the landslide.

File:Aberfan Disaster.jpg

The Aberfan Disaster 21 October, 1966

Nobody in the village was able to see it, but everyone could hear the roar of the approaching landslide. Some at the school thought it was a jet about to crash and one teacher ordered his class to hide under their desks. Gaynor Minett, then an eight-year-old at the school, later recalled:

"It was a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can't remember any more but I woke up to find that a horrible nightmare had just begun in front of my eyes."

After the landslide there was total silence. George Williams, who was trapped in the wreckage, remembered:

"In that silence you couldn't hear a bird or a child".

Rescue efforts

After the main landslide stopped, frantic parents rushed to the scene and began digging through the rubble, some clawing at the debris with their bare hands, trying to uncover buried children. As news spread, hundreds of people drove to Aberfan to try and help with the rescue, but their efforts were largely in vain. Water and mud still rushing down the slope and the growing crowd of untrained volunteers severely hampered the work of the trained rescue teams who by then arriving. A few children were pulled out alive in the first two hours, but no survivors were found after 11am that day

By the next day, Saturday, some 2000 emergency services workers and volunteers were on the scene. Some had already dug continually for more than 24 hours, but because of the mass and consistency of the slag it was nearly a week before all the bodies were recovered.

Bethania Chapel, 250 yards from the diaster site, was taken over as a temporary mortuary and missing person’s bureau from 21 October until 4 November 1966 and its vestry was used to house Red Cross volunteers and St John’s Ambulance stretcher-bearers. The smaller Aberfan Calvinistic Chapel was used as a second mortuary from 22-29 October and became the final resting-place for the victims before burial.

Two doctors were charged with certifying the deaths and examining the bodies; the cause of death was typically found to be asphyxia, fractured skull or multiple crush injuries. A team of 400 embalmers arrived in Aberfan on Sunday and under police supervision they cleaned and prepared over 100 bodies and placed them in coffins, obtained from South Wales, the Midlands, Bristol and even Northern Ireland. The bodies were released to the families from the morning of Monday 24 October.

The final death toll was 144; 116 of the dead were children between the ages of 7 and 10 -- almost half of the children at the Pantglas Junior School, and five of their teachers. Most of the victims were buried at the Bryntaf Cemetery in Aberfan.

Actions of Lord Robens

When news of the disaster reached him, the chair of the National Coal Board (NCB), Lord Robens of Woldingham, did not immediately go to the scene. He instead went ahead with his investiture as chancellor of the University of Surrey, and did not arrive at Aberfan until the following day (Saturday). After the disaster he controversially claimed that nothing could have been done to prevent the slide.

NCB officers covered up for Robens when contacted by the Secretary of State for Wales, falsely claiming that Robens was personally directing relief work when in fact he was not present. When he eventually reached Aberfan, Robens attributed the disaster to 'natural unknown springs' beneath the tip, a statement which the locals knew to be false -- the NCB had in fact been tipping on top of springs that were clearly marked on maps of the neighbourhood, and where villagers had played as children.

Inquiry and aftermath

On 26 October 1966, after resolutions by both Houses of Parliament, the Secretary of State for Wales appointed a Tribunal to inquire into the causes of and circumstances relating to the Aberfan disaster, to be chaired by respected Welsh barrister and Privy Councillor Lord Justice Edmund Davies. Before the tribunal began, the UK Attorney General imposed restrictions on speculation in the media about the causes of the disaster.

The Tribunal sat for 76 days -- the longest inquiry of its type in British history up to that time -- interviewing 136 witnesses, examining 300 exhibits and hearing 2,500,000 words of evidence, which ranged from the history of mining in the area to the region's geological conditions.

Lord Robens made a dramatic appearance the final days of the Tribunal to give evidence, at which point he conceded that the National Coal Board had been at fault. Had this admission been made at the outset, much of what followed at the Tribunal would have rendered unnecessary.

The Tribunal retired on 28 April 1967 to consider its verdict. Its damning report, published on 3 August 1967, found that the blame rested entirely with the National Coal Board, and that the basic cause was the NCB's "total absence of tipping policy.

The report noted that the NCB was "... following in the footsteps of their predecessors. They were not guided either by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Mines and Quarries or by legislation" and also found that there was "... no legislation dealing with the safety of tips in force in this or any country, except in part of West Germany and in South Africa."

" ...the Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack of direction from above. Not villains but decent men, led astray by foolishness or by ignorance or by both in combination, are responsible for what happened at Aberfan".

"Blame for the disaster rests upon the National Coal Board. This is shared, though in varying degrees, among the NCB headquarters, the South Western Divisional Board, and certain individuals ... The legal liability of the NCB to pay compensation of the personal injuries, fatal or otherwise, and damage to property, is incontestable and uncontested."

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.

The Tribunal found that repeated warnings about the dangerous condition of the tip had been ignored, and that colliery engineers at all levels had concentrated only on conditions underground. In one of its most memorable paragraphs, the Report noted:

"We found that many witnesses ... had been oblivious of what lay before their eyes. It did not enter their consciousness. They were like moles being asked about the habits of birds."

The Tribunal also found that the tips had never been surveyed, and right up to the time of the landslide they were continuously being added to in a chaotic and unplanned manner. The authorities' disregard for the unstable geological conditions and its failure to act after previous smaller slides were found to have been major factors that contributed to the catastrophe.

The NCB was ordered to pay compensation to the families at the rate of £500 per child.

The public demonstrated their sympathy by donating money, with little idea of how it would be spent. Within a few months, nearly 90,000 contributions had been received, totalling £1,606,929 (2008:£21.4m). The management of this fund caused considerable controversy over the years.

In 1997 the UK Pubilc Records Office released previously embargoed documents pertaining to the Aberfan Disaster. They revealed startling new information about the machinations of Lord Robens and the NCB in the wake of Aberfan. The Davies Report had found that the NCB's liability was "incontestable and uncontested" and it was widely felt that the NCB should have to bear the entire cost of removing the dangeous tips above Aberfan, but Lord Robens refused to pay the full cost, thereby putting the Trustees of the disaster fund under "intolerable pressure".

In a further display of contempt for the victims and their families, Robens then "raided" UK£150,000 from the Disaster Fund to cover the cost of removing the tips -- an action which was "unquestionably unlawful" under charity law -- and the Charity Commission notably failed to act to protect the Fund from Robens' action.

As a result of the concerns raised by the Aberfan disaster, and in line with Finding XVII of the Davies Report, the British government passed The Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act 1969.. This new act was designed "to make further provision in relation to tips associated with mines and quarries; to prevent disused tips constituting a danger to members of the public; and for purposes connected with those matters". The new legislation was an extension of the earlier The Mines and Quarries Act 1954, which did not mention tips in its provisions -- in fact, the only reference to public safety in that Act was a section dealing with fencing abandoned or disused mines and quarries to prevent people falling into them. Indeed, under the terms of the 1954 Act, the Aberfan disaster was not even required to be formally reported to HM Inspectorate of Mines and Quarries because no mine workers had been injured.

Thanks in part to a lengthy public campaign headed by academics and authors Professor Iain McLean and Dr Martin Johnes, the incoming Blair Labour government paid back the £150,000 in 1997 -- although taking account of inflation the amount repaid should have been nearly £2 million.

Merthyr Vale Colliery was closed in 1989.

In February 2007 the Welsh Assembly announced the donation of £2 million to the Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund, in part as recompense for the money requisitioned by the government in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

Songs

"The Aberfan Coal Tip Tragedy" by Thom Parrott, included on the Smithsonian Folkways CD set "Best of Broadside." Also recorded by Danish folk group Paddy Doyle’s.

The Bee Gees’ single "New York Mining Disaster 1941" — despite its misleading title, aimed at selling the record in America — is a moving response to the Aberfan disaster.

"Aberfan" by David Ackles, included on his album Five and Dime.

References

• Archives Network Wales - Glamorgan Record Office - Aberfan Disaster Inquiry, Chief Surveyor's Papers

External links

• Aberfan Disaster
• Old Merthyr Tydfil: Aberfan DisasterPhotographs of the Aberfan Disaster
• Letter from Merthyr Borough Council sent to NCB, warning of danger, dated over three years before the disaster
• BBC News - Private service remembers Aberfan - memorial section 21/10/06
• BBC – On This Day
• BBC Wales South East - Your Memories
• Corporatism and Regulatory Failure: Government Response to the Aberfan Disaster
• Digital Journalist - Aberfan: The Days After - by I.C. Rapoport
• Rapo.com - Photographs of the Aftermath
• South Wales Police - The Aberfan Disaster 21st October 1966
• The Tribunal of Inquiry into the Aberfan Disaster
• Wales on the Web - Aberfan Disaster Archive
• Income from Aberfan's £2m will be for memorials and children
• www.geograph.co.uk : photos of Aberfan and surrounding area
• The Aberfan Disaster from Gathering the Jewels