Forty years ago today 144 people died in the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan when a coal pit spoil heap became unstable after several days of rain and slid down the hillside enveloping a row of houses and more tragically a primary school where 116 children were crushed to death by the shale and mudslide.
The scene above is a familiar one to anyone who has ever lived in a pit village. My wife is from such a place in the northeast and whilst their pit closed in the early 1960's the spoil heaps still remain in what is now a commuter suburb of Newcastle - landscaped, lowered and made more stable maybe, covered as they are now in grass and small trees, they still look incongrious in an otherwise flat coastal landscape - and they exist all over the north east coastline in the same format.
Its the price we pay for our industrial heritage, just as in the blogs from yesterday where large industrial cities like Leeds copped for the filth and blackness of manufacturing pollution, then pit villages had their own filth to contend with - the constant presence of dust and mud in the streets, swept clean every day by proud housewifes but still omnipresent in the air and in the clothes that the menfolk brought home after every shift, filth and grime and huge mountains of waste shale and shattered coal fragments towering around the village wherever the pit managers could find to dump them.
The facts of the Aberfan disaster are well documented - a shale heap dumped many years previously on top of a natural spring, made unstable by years of saturation and then made mobile by heavy rainfall over a period of several days, shale fragments became liquid, the base collapsed and the mountain moved.
The facts from my recollection were that I was the same age at the time as many of the children who died at their schooldesks, I was ten years old. Without checking I believe that it happened at the end of the week (should be easy to check) as my recollection is of visiting my grandma (the same one who ran away from the Queens Hotel) and we always visited her house on a Saturday - it was the day after the disaster when the newspapers were simply filled with the news and the photographs and the immense sadness of the event and she sat there in her chair surrounded by the newspapers that she had bought that morning and cried the whole time that we were there - she was a god fearing catholic and carried all of the human guilt of that religion, never questioned how a god could apparently order that sort of thing to happen, simply accepted that it was his way, even at ten years old I couldn't reconcile how a god could be so vindictive as to wipe out a generation of children from a village just to teach the National Coal Board a lesson, still can't.
In human terms it can be compared to the events of 9/11 in America - this country stood still for a week while the uncertain death toll rose and then the anger kicked in although in this case we had no foreign country to go and bomb afterwards, we just had the National Coal Board to blame, who were in fact a Government owned company. Ultimately they were held responsible but no one person in particular was ever stood up as a stool pigeon, no-one was sacked or reprimanded, a faceless Government corporation had messed up big style, they apologised, they cleaned the village up, they paid for the funerals and built a nice garden of rememberance - and then they carried on digging for coal.
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