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The rescue |
The rescue
We are so used to
having coal tipped near the school and this noise sounded just like
coal being tipped only much more noise than usual;
it was a
heavy sound. … I was going towards the school, and I suddenly realised
the sound was coming nearer all the time, and the feeling it was the
tip came to my mind straight away; so I ran back to the house; my little
girl was in bed, so I got her and the wife outside and I went back to
the school.
… The north side of the school was completely down, and the tip had
come right down the road, Moy Road. I went straight into the boiler house
of
the junior school and raked out the fire. … I came out of the boiler
house and saw in the classroom next to the boiler house some children there
and they were unable to get out, so I tried to smash the window to get
the children out, but there was not enough space to get them out that way.
The teacher managed to open the door somehow. … I went in through
the door and the children came out past me, out to the yard. Then I went
round to the front of the school where Mrs. Williams’ class was.
I saw she was in there and she could not breathe – she shouted she
could not breathe. So I went in through the window, the window was that
height from the yard, you know. I climbed in through the window. There
was some children trapped in the masonry; I got those children out, passed
them out through the window. After that I went outside again and saw a
little girl on top of the tank above Miss Jennings’ classroom. She
was right up and wanted to come down. How she got there I do not know.
But I got up on the tank and got her down. Then I saw Mrs. Williams, a
teacher, and went to the assembly hall and started digging them out. After
that I do not know, I cannot remember anything; all I know is my two boys
were buried in the rubble.
School caretaker
Then the next thing
I remember was seeing a mass of men coming up from the colliery still
with their lamp lights on. That was really moving because
they were black, they’d just come off the shift and they’d
been sent straight up. And they had their lights on. And after that they
just took over from us.
Teacher, Pantglas Junior School
I went down to work,
changed, went down the pit and I hadn’t been
down the pit ten minutes when they sent for everybody to come up, that
the tip had slide. Well we came up, I couldn’t fathom it out; I’d
never seen anything like it. The front of the school was there but there
was no back. We went there and we dug and dug all day.
Miner and bereaved parent
We had to break
the front windows and then climb in. … We had no
tools – we used our bare hands and anything we could find. But there
was nothing anyone could do, between the slurry and the water coming down.
That was the worst, not being able to do anything. There’s nothing
as bad as that.
Bereaved parent
The women were already
there, like stone they were, clawing at the filth – it
was like a black river – some had no skin left on their hands. Miners
are a tough breed, we don’t show our feelings, but some of the lads
broke down.
Miner
I have been asked to inform that there has been a landslide at Pantglas.
The tip has come down on the school.
Emergency call received by Merthyr Tydfil police, 9.25 a.m., 21 October
1966
We didn’t know
what to expect. I had no idea of the scale of the thing. It was a great
shock. There was absolute chaos and somehow
I had
to organise that chaos.
Assistant Chief Constable
I left by car for
the scene of the incident. … and I arrived at Moy
Road … at about 10 o’clock. That was near the infants’ school.
With the co-operation of the chief inspector I set up an incident post
at a police car on the colliery side of the incident to maintain communications
with police headquarters by radio telephone. … I then made a reconnaissance
of the whole area above the school, and I managed to get round to the
streets to the other side, the north side of the incident at the Mackintosh
hotel.
This reconnaissance revealed that not only was the Pantglas junior school
buried under approximately 20 to 30 ft. of debris, but a large number
of houses in Moy Road and Pantglas had been demolished and submerged
under
a pile of debris and liquid mud.
… at 10.30 a large quantity of water was still pouring into the disaster
area, and I was informed that it was coming from the mountain springs
and two large water mains which had been fractured when the disused canal and
disused railway embankment had broken.
Chief Constable of the County Borough of Merthyr Tydfil
They [The vehicle
and rescue workers] had to retire a little to avoid being swamped by
the new rush of water and slurry. … It certainly
hindered the rescuers from the end that I was working and had that water
not come
quite a number of properties would have been saved.
Chief Inspector in Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Police
As I was in the shop there was dirty black water coming down the hill,
and as I was waiting my turn to be served I shouted out that we were
going to be flooded. As I dashed back to the house with my little baby
Alan,
who was just one, in my arms, I fell over the milk bottles.
With that my friend Glenys from a few doors away arrived with her daughter
Sian who was dirty. She said Sian had come home from class all covered
in dirt, and she had thrust her into my arms before running back up to
the school. I asked Sian what had happened and she said that the school
had fallen down.
I didn’t know what to do, so I went round to Glenys’ house
where the door was wide open and a stream of dirty water was just rushing
through.
I ran up to the top then and when I saw the school had fallen down, my
legs just turned to jelly. I couldn’t walk. I just stood there dazed
as all the time water flooded my home. Glenys came past and said she hadn’t
seen [my daughter].
Aberfan resident
As I was being carried
out I realised I had lost my jumper. It was a mustard-coloured one
that my mother had knitted. There were five children
in our family
and you couldn’t afford to lose a jumper, so I tried to go back
and look for it because I thought I would get into trouble. I was taken
straight
to hospital and my parents did not come to see me until evening. They
must have spent the whole day not knowing where I was, not knowing if
I was
alive or dead. But we never talked about it.
Pupil, Pantglas Junior School
I could hear men’s voices but I didn’t
know what they were doing or where they were. I heard someone crying
and then this voice
was asking me if I could see daylight and I could put my finger through
it
and then I was dug out.
I was passed through a chain of men, out through a window and into the
yard and handed to the policeman, who carried me to the side of a wall
where he placed me on the ground. … I looked back at the school and
I just couldn’t believe what had happened. It was completely flat.
Pupil, Pantglas Junior School
At that time I’d bought felt pens and they were rather
a new thing. They cost 2 and 6 at the time. And I had these three felt
pens, a red one,
a blue one and a mauve one. And I was more interested in getting these
felt pens out. And the fire officer said to me, ‘Forget those bloody
felt pens and let's get you out.
Pupil, Pantglas Junior School
Men, women and children
were tearing away the debris in an effort to reach the trapped children.
As the men shovelled debris from spade to
spade,
children’s books appeared. An odd cap was seen. A broken doll.
Mothers gathered around the school steps, some weeping, some silent,
Some shaking their heads in disbelief. …
The slurry had piled up 25 feet against the school, smashing its way
through the building, filling the classrooms.
Teams of 50 men and boys worked in long rows from the school building,
handing buckets of slurry up the mountainside from the classrooms.
On each side of the school mechanical shovels and bulldozers gouged the
debris out. An endless line of lorries carried it away. … At regular
intervals everything would come to a halt – the roar of heavy machinery,
the shouts, the scraping of shovels. Not a murmur would be heard among
the thousand workers. Time stood still. And rescuers listened tensely for
the slightest sound from the wreckage – for a cry, a moan, a movement – anything
which would give hope to the mothers and fathers.
First Journalist on the scene
Nobody told me what
had happened at the time. I asked somebody next to me, it must have
been a couple of hours later, he said "What is this
stuff?"; I did not know myself what it was, and I was under the impression
it was an explosion of gas. I did not think the tip had slipped; I did
not realise anything about the tip. It must have been a good two hours
when somebody said "it’s the tip that has slipped." I
did not know; I was just knocked for six; I did not realise that it was
that.
Bereaved parent
It’s like a blitz – as
though a bomb had been dropped on the whole school.
We can only work in small groups, and gas is leaking. Progress is slow,
as we have to prop up the beams and wall as we go in.
The chances of survival are negligible, but I’m hope I’m
wrong.
Rescue worker
You only have to
mention what you want it and it comes. We’ve had
no trouble at all to get anything.
Civil Defence worker
The really incredible
thing was that you couldn’t walk five yards
without a member of the WVRS or the Salvation Army or the Red Cross putting
a cup of soup, a cup of coffee or a cup of chocolate into your hand.
Detective Constable
‘ We cut up
cotton sheets for bandages, and gave blankets and pillows for the children
as they were brought out on stretchers’
‘ Rescuers came in for everything, and we gave all we could. All
we thought of was that children’s lives were at stake.’
‘ Everything lost its value in comparison with those children’.
Aberfan Resident
No one was brought out alive after 11 o’clock.
Chief Constable of the County Borough of Merthyr Tydfil
… the roads leading to the incident both from Merthyr Vale and from
Troedyrhiw were blocked with vehicles with rescue workers and helpers,
both official
and voluntary, and similarly the A.470 road between Pentrebach and the
Travellers Rest was becoming congested, and in a number of places it had
become completely blocked. … The mortuary was set up in the
early stages at Bethania Chapel, and I appointed an officer of the
regional
crime squad to take over the identification and handling of the bodies,
and by
11.30 at night on the first day 67 bodies had been brought in and
identification was then in progress.
Chief Constable of the County Borough of Merthyr Tydfil
I reached the tragic village of Aberfan on Saturday morning. The
initial panic and hysteria had died and now there was a well-ordered
rescue
operation under-way. But it was still a grim sight. There was a greyness
everywhere.
Faces from the tiredness and anguish, houses and roads from the oozing
slurry of the tips.
The grey-black mass seemed to have penetrated everywhere and all
around were evacuated houses.
Merthyr Express
There was an estimated 2,000 volunteers now [Saturday] at the scene.
Many of them had been working for 24 hours.
First journalist on the scene
Heavy rain started at 2.30 p.m. Saturday causing immense anxiety
and fear that the huge tip would slide again and engulf the rescuers. … By
this time about 2,500 workers were on the scene. Extra police were
called in because in-experienced rescuers would not leave the scene.
Merthyr Express
… no less than 144 men, women and children lost their lives. 116
of the victims were children, most of them between the ages of 7
and 10 …
Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the Disaster at Aberfan
I was eighteen and at home in Wales when an urgent plea for help was broadcast on the radio. That very morning a mountain of coal dust, slag and slurry had collapsed and engulfed a primary school in the tiny community of Aberfan.All able-bodied Welshmen were urged to make their way to the village. Clutching spades, my father, brothers and myself unhesitatingly set off too, all of us eager to shoulder our clear responsibility to help our neighbours.
The arc lights blazed over the area which had, so recently, echoed to the sounds of children playing. Burly miners wept openly as they worked, digging through the night. A hush would descend on the whole site as the cry went out that yet another dead child had been found. Altogether the dead bodies of 116 children and 28 adults were unearthed and the memory of that awful tragedy still lives on in the minds of loved ones and friends. Those families continue to need our comfort and prayer. I shall never forget the unbearable poignancy of a little lifeless hand I saw protruding from the landslide.
Lyndon Bowring
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