The Aberfan disaster of 21 October 1966 began with a warning letter that was typed, filed and ignored three years earlier.
This is the full story of the Merthyr Vale Colliery spoil tip that failed above a village in South Wales — told through the men on the mountain that morning, the people in the village below, and the inquiry that followed.
At half past seven, crane driver Gwyn Brown found that the summit of Tip 7 had dropped about ten feet overnight. The gang could not telephone a warning down to the colliery, because the cable on the mountain had been stolen. A slinger, Dai Jones, was sent down on foot instead.
Tip 7 had been built over natural springs on Merthyr Mountain. About six and a half inches of rain fell in the three weeks beforehand. The saturated waste liquefied and moved as a flowslide — roughly a hundred thousand cubic metres travelling around five hundred metres downhill into Aberfan and Pantglas Junior School.
We cover the 1963 warning from borough engineer D. C. W. Jones, Councillor Gwyneth Williams, school meals clerk Nansi Williams, deputy head David Beynon, and Jeff Edwards, the last child brought out alive by fireman Roy Thomas. Then the Tribunal of Inquiry under Lord Justice Edmund Davies, the verdict against the National Coal Board, Lord Robens, the £150,000 taken from the Disaster Fund and repaid only in 1997, the Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act 1969, and the Disused Mine and Quarry Tips (Wales) Act 2025.
Every fact here is drawn from archive and official sources, listed by chapter below.
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Chapters:
0:00 Ten Feet of Missing Ground
1:07 The Village Under the Tips
2:55 The Letters Nobody Acted On
4:46 Tip Seven and the Springs
6:08 Quarter Past Nine
9:17 The Dig
11:21 Seventy-Six Days
13:37 The Money and the Law
15:47 What Is Still There
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