It was 1966 and I was 18 and a week away from my birthday. On the radio I heard a report that one of the coal tips that littered the valleys of South Wales had collapsed without warning and sent a wave of slurry down onto the town below.
As reports filtered through it became clear that a disaster had occured. The slurry had not only destroyed 18 houses… it had swamped a school full of children and many were missing. The natural thing to do was to get there as fast as possible to help… but the reports asked people to stay awy. . There were already trained miners working desperately to clear the area as quickly as possible and there were so many people there already the rest would just be in the way. So we had to sit and wait… and hope… and wait. And then hope was gone.
The bodies appeared one by one… 116 children and 28 adults. Almost an entire generation dead in the space of a few minutes.The pictures were horrifiying… grown men sobbing as they desperately tried to dig through a sea of mud to rescue their children.
Some were saved of course… most weren’t.
We all knew the tips weren’t safe, they’d been moving for years but despite complaints nobody took them seriously. This one changed all that.
It transpired that the tip had been built on a stream which had slowly turned the base of the tip into slurry. For years the tip had been on the edge of disaster but the drainage was just sufficient to stop any major movement. Then in mid-October there was heavy rain and the tip simply couldn’t hold any more. In seconds the side of the mountian became a flood of sludge that swept away anything in its path. And in its path was a school nd 18 houses.
None of us locals will ever forget that time. It’s 40 years on and though I had no friends or family involved, I certainly haven’t
The Eclectic Interweb 
I had only just started primary school when it happened. I remember we had a special assembly the day after. I guess all the parents held on to their children a little bit tighter on the way home.
Twenty years after I visited Aberfan on a geography field trip. There’s just a slight grass slope now. Like Hillsborough or Dunblane, just the name itself brings back so many sad images.