Theo Davies-Lewis

Wales is terrified of a repeat of the Aberfan disaster

Rescue workers in Aberfan, 1966 (photo: Getty)

While the Westminster bubble has spent the last few weeks focusing on Tory sleaze and COP26, the Welsh have been facing a far more consequential challenge. The problem is the country’s coal tips: monstrously black, heavy slag heaps, omnipotent and ever-present reminders of the great industry that once dominated Britain’s economy and fuelled the furnace of the Empire.

Rarely do I find myself agreeing with the rabble rousing Rhondda socialist, Leanne Wood, but the former Plaid Cymru leader (who unexpectedly lost her South Wales seat in the Senedd election in May) sounded a prescient warning this month. She argued that unless action was taken to manage these tips properly, another Aberfan was ‘on the cards’. For once this was not nationalist hyperbole; it was a stark warning that has for too long been unheeded.

I was born in a mining community, near Pontypridd, where tinted black hillsides are an essential part of the landscape. And in Wales, Aberfan sends a chill down people’s spines. It was our darkest day in the twentieth century when children at Pantglas Junior School were crushed by a black tsunami of spoil, caused by a rain-saturated mountainside. The collapse of the spoil tip killed 144 people in total. Dramatised in The Crown, it would be easy to imagine these kinds of disasters, which were a recurring plague of mining in Britain, as a relic of the past. Especially since only a couple of mines – the Aberpergwm colliery and the Ffos-y-fran opencast mine – still extract coal in Wales

Wales has suffered for centuries at the hands of its extractive economy

Alas, that is not the case. There has been a resurged interest in the legacy of Wales’s coal mining industry after a series of disasters were narrowly avoided in recent years. Most shocking was the collapse of 60,000 tonnes of colliery spoil above Tylorstown in February last year, triggered by heavy rainfall pushing the spoil down the valley.

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