The Aberfan Disaster: A Welsh Village, 1966
1966 · event
On the morning of 21 October 1966 the children of Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan, a mining village in south Wales, had just arrived for the last day before the half term holiday. Above the village stood a tip of waste rock and slurry from the local colliery. After days of heavy rain the water saturated tip began to move, and a slide of black debris came down the hillside and buried the school and a row of houses. One hundred and forty four people died. One hundred and sixteen of them were children.
Aberfan was a close community built around a single industry, and almost every family in the village lost someone or knew someone who did. Miners left the pit and dug through the night beside parents and neighbours. Within hours it was clear that no one else would be brought out alive, yet the digging continued because stopping was unthinkable.
The tribunal that followed found that the disaster could have been prevented. The tip had been built over natural springs, its instability had been raised before, and the warnings had not been acted upon. The National Coal Board was held responsible. Money donated from around the world went into a disaster fund, and it took a public campaign, and many years, before the remaining tips above the village were finally removed.
Aberfan changed the law on how mining waste is placed and monitored across Britain, and it changed the way institutions are expected to answer to the communities they affect. The village keeps the memory quietly. A memorial garden stands where the school once stood, and the cemetery on the hillside holds rows of white arches for a generation of children that a village lost in a single morning.