The Aberfan Disaster: The Day the Mountain Came Down

[00:00:00] Kyle Risi: It's Friday, the 21st of October, 1966, and it was the last day before half term lessons began as usual, chairs scraped across the floors. Books were taken outta backpacks and voices of teachers settling the class, filled the corridors, but high up on aberfan. Hidden beneath the October fog workers starting their day suddenly felt the ground beneath their feet shift.

Without warning, a wall of black coal waste began hurtling down the mountainside, oh my God. AB AAN plus 116 of its children. Adam, this story is often told through broad accounts, facts, ordinance, surveys, and testimony, but what's missing are the voices of those who lived through it Today, I'm gonna tell you their story.

Jesus.

Welcome to another episode of the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating Things. A week Leave Variety Podcaster gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

[00:01:32] Adam Cox: We explore strange true stories from the worlds of true crime, dark history, scandals, mysteries, and remarkable people.

[00:01:40] Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your Ring Master for this week's episode.

[00:01:42] Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the chiropractor for all of our retired contortionists.

[00:01:48] Kyle Risi: Very good free healthcare. Unless we are charging

[00:01:50] Adam Cox: him. It's not, it's not free. And yeah, all of our contortionists, you know, they do a great job in the, in the circus, but you know, they're, they're, they've got back problems.

Kyle.

[00:01:58] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They're Agent H and out.

[00:02:00] Adam Cox: Yeah. So I'm there making sure that they can still move at a age of 35.

[00:02:04] Kyle Risi: I like that. We are a compassionate employer. It shows that we're a, I don't know, we're not just all about the money.

[00:02:10] Adam Cox: Yeah, don't look at the interest payments.

[00:02:12] Kyle Risi: The interest payments. You mean the, the premiums.

[00:02:15] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:02:15] Kyle Risi: Guys, a quick bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you enjoy the show and you want to show us that you like what we do, then make sure to follow the compendium. We are on all the apps, so there is no excuse.

[00:02:27] Adam Cox: And while you're at it, please leave us a cheeky review. It really helps other people find the show, which in effect keeps these studio lights on.

So we do love reading them all, whether they're on Spotify or whether they're on our own website.

[00:02:41] Kyle Risi: Spotify would be a comment though, wouldn't it?

[00:02:43] Adam Cox: Well then come to our website, the companion podcast.com.

[00:02:45] Kyle Risi: No, I want it, I want it on Spotify or Apple. 'cause then it's official. As long as it's nice because I can't remove them if they're nasty, nasty, hateful listeners.

Adam, that is enough of the housekeeping because today on the compendium, we are diving into an assembly that didn't happen, ignored warnings and lives that deserved better.

[00:03:06] Adam Cox: So, uh, you put the annunciation on assembly. So I feel like that's a clue.

[00:03:11] Kyle Risi: It is a clue, and it's a heartbreaking detail about today's story.

Today's story, it is a disaster, but the true scale of the horror for me wasn't really apparent until I started really digging into the details. And so I ended up completely rewriting the episode because to tell the story through ordinance, survey, maps and tribunals is to risk kind of losing sight of the individuals at the very heart of today's story.

And that is something that a lot of the synopsis kind of missed out because this year, Adam Mark, six years since today's story actually took place. And so in memory of what happened, I wanted to kind of frame this episode through a few of the people who actually experienced it and what actually happened to them, because of course our listeners click onto this, they'll know exactly what this episode is.

But of course, I'd like to tease it out for you. Adam. On the morning of Friday, the 21st of October, 1966, 10-year-old Janet Brown told her mother, Marilyn, that she was not going to school. Janet had already tried to pull the shtick the previous evening, and Marilyn understood why it was after all the last day of term.

And Janet was desperate to begin her week off a few hours early, but Marilyn was having none of it. Janet was categorically going to school. Have you been in that situation? I don't think you have ever been in that situation. You are quite a compliant child.

[00:04:33] Adam Cox: Yeah, I don't think I was really allowed to sky school.

[00:04:37] Kyle Risi: Well, it's gonna be a bit of a thing that is gonna cause a lot of guilt for Marilyn because after more protests and more tears, Marilyn gently usher Janet to the front door and watched her walk begrudgingly up the terrace line street that they lived on. It had rained almost nonstop for three weeks, and although the skies had cleared overnight, a thick blanket of fog had drifted over the village.

It was so thick that by the time Janet turns to give her mother one final scowl, Marilyn had already disappeared into it. After seeing her off, Marilyn shut the front door and was just relieved to finally sit down with a cup of tea and get her day started. However, elsewhere in the village, not everyone shared Janice disdain for going to school.

Brothers, Alan and Phil Thomas were wolfing down their breakfast while their sister looked on in disgust. Meanwhile, six doors down, Alan and Phil's 7-year-old cousin, Karen Thomas, was sent off to knock for the boys so they could all walk to school together. Karen's mother tried standing at the front door, hoping to give a bit of a wave to her sister-in-law, but just one door down.

Karen had already disappeared into their thick fog, and so she too shut the door and began her morning. A few minutes later, Alan, Phil and Karen set off to school together at the end of their road, 12-year-old Alan split off towards their senior school while Phil and Karen carried on towards Panasas Junior School.

By eight fifty nine, two hundred and forty children had gathered in the courtyard, and at 9:00 AM sharp head teacher, Mrs. Jennings rang the bell, and finally the last day of term was underway. How are you feeling, Adam?

[00:06:17] Adam Cox: I feel on edge.

[00:06:18] Kyle Risi: Do you feel something ominous is coming?

[00:06:20] Adam Cox: I do. Yeah.

[00:06:22] Kyle Risi: Adam, the day normally started with morning assembly, but Ms.

Jennings decided to postpone this until the end of the school day to allow the children to say goodbye to their teachers with hugs and high fives. But Ms. Jennings also planned to use this time to remind the children not to play on the railway, not to go near the river or towards the mind. Tips high up on Moni.

Murer. Moni means just the mountain. It's a Welsh term for mountain.

[00:06:48] Adam Cox: Oh, so in Wales?

[00:06:49] Kyle Risi: We're in Wales. Yes. So Adam, against their usual routine, the children went straight into their classrooms, the sounds of scraping chairs, teachers settling down their classes, commotions and books coming outta bags started filling the corridors.

Meanwhile, 500 metres above the village. On that very same mountain, Gwen Brown and his team was starting to work on the waist. Tip number seven, this is where Mur Veil Collary routinely dumped waste that was being extracted deep within inside the local coal mine. That morning, Gwen's team had been dealing with a serious problem with a very heavy iron railway track used to move waste trams towards the edge of the tip.

Overnight. Adam, the ground beneath them, had sunk by around three metres, twisting the rail and leaving a section of the track hanging down into the crater. It was pretty urgent because those heavy rails were also connected to the track that Gwen's tipping Crane operated on. And there was a risk that as it collapsed further, they could potentially drag the crane down into the crater with them.

Gwen tried calling management for instructions on what to do, but there was no longer a working telephone line at the tip. The copper wiring connecting it to the mine had been stolen many times in the past, and so the messenger was sent down the mountainside in person. However, while they waited by 9:00 AM the crater had almost doubled in size.

Management still hadn't responded, and so at a loss as what to do. Gwen and his team decided to take a tea break, expecting a very rough day ahead of them repairing the rail. However, Adam, while they were on their break at around 9:11 AM Gwen felt a sudden shift beneath his feet. He says the ground felt like it was moving upwards, but then suddenly it dipped.

Then Gwen and his team watched in horror as 110,000 tonnes of coal waste transformed into an enormous wave of a liquified slurry and began tearing down the mountainside at 50 miles per hour. Down in the village, what sounded like a fighter jet ripping through the sky started to grab people's attention.

Many people, Adam instinctively, just looked up out of their windows, but the fog meant there was nothing to see. The sound roared onwards, and people expected it to come overhead any second. But then suddenly the ground shook as a wave smashed into the village. As it did, it engulfed 18 houses and crashed through the back of Penas Junior School, bearing everything in its path in 30 metres of slurry.

[00:09:34] Adam Cox: Wow.

[00:09:35] Kyle Risi: Adam, that morning, 144 people. Were killed. Adam, today on the compendium, I'm gonna tell you about the Aberfan disaster of 1966. Have you heard of the story before?

[00:09:48] Adam Cox: I have, yes. Like I think I've either seen documentaries or I've seen it dramatised in the past. The

[00:09:55] Kyle Risi: ground would probably be the one that comes to mind where it was one of the great tests of Queen Elizabeth ii.

[00:10:01] Adam Cox: Yeah, I think it was that, but I'm sure I've seen it in something else, but maybe not. But yeah, it was pretty much a tragedy. I, I, I forgot about, it was about like the coal, I thought it was just like a mudslide or something like that.

[00:10:12] Kyle Risi: Yeah, it's a horrific story Adam. Um, it has been suggested on the Patreon quite a few times, but I've never really been sure how to physically tell it.

But the documentary that made me stop my tracks was a BBC documentary called Surviving Abberant, which tells the story through many of the survivors experiences. And that's where the horror of what actually happened really land for me, because very often the story is told through what went wrong, corporate greed, ordinance, maps, and signs that they should have been aware of.

But it's really the experiences of the people that really made this such a harrowing story. And Adam, the thing is though the disaster didn't end when the slurry stopped moving, it continued through nightmares, through survivor guilt and the empty spaces left by children who never came home on that last day of term.

[00:11:03] Adam Cox: Yeah. And obviously you started with that story with Janet and the guilt that the mother's gonna be feeling. 'cause I'm guessing Janet is gonna be one of the victims here.

[00:11:12] Kyle Risi: That's right. And I think that is one of the few details that I'm talking about when I talk about how horrific the story is, because you don't get to hear those accounts of those parents, right?

When they talk about, well, that day Janet clearly did not want to go to school. Do you know what I mean?

[00:11:29] Adam Cox: And yeah, and I mean, what parent would know what was gonna happen, right? So you're just thinking, no, you're, you need to go to school, you're doing the right thing, but ah, if only that mother just gone, alright, fine, I'll let you have the day off.

[00:11:42] Kyle Risi: And when it, you have a tragedy like this that affects the entire community, of course you don't want to be going around reminding people that your child had survived. And so actually what was really disturbing to hear is that some of the survivors were encouraged not to talk openly about the fact that they had survived.

And you've gotta. Think about, well, how does that help with your recovery? And like, this came from a place of compassion. But for me, like I said, if you can't talk about it, how do you heal? And actually, that's partly why Abba Van struggled to heal. This year Marks 60 years since that disaster, which sounds like a long time.

But Adam, it really isn't. Many of those children could still be alive today. Many of the survivors are. And those children who died, would've had careers, would've had families, would've had children of their own. So while it's important to explain what went wrong on the mountainside and who was responsible, I thought, especially in light of the anniversary, it would be more powerful to tell the story through some of the people who had actually lived through it.

Because I think honestly, that's where the real story actually is.

[00:12:46] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:12:47] Kyle Risi: And so, Adam, to understand the disaster, let's first understand just how intrinsic coal was to Aberfan and the surrounding communities. Because until the 1860s, Aberfan was more than just a few farming cottages beside the river taf.

During the industrial revolution, as coal was discovered across the valleys, Aberfan was transformed into an I importing industrial hub. There was barely a family in Aberfan that didn't have either a father, a brother, a husband, or a neighbour working at the mind in some capacity. And one of those husbands was Gerald Tar.

Gerald and his wife Shirley, lived on Moy Road just on the edge of Aberfan, right at the foot of the actual mountain where the coal waste was actually being stored. And at the mine, Gerald mostly worked underground digging coal, like depending on the dip that they were digging on any given day. He says you could easily spend like 90% of your day bent over.

[00:13:40] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's, that would, I mean, I suffer just after half an hour.

[00:13:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Remember we talked about like, oh, that feeling of taking your bra off at the end of night.

[00:13:48] Adam Cox: Yes.

[00:13:48] Kyle Risi: You step out their mind, you get to kind of stretch your back for the first time that that feeling of a, the pain, first of all.

[00:13:54] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:13:54] Kyle Risi: But then that relief of like, oh, I can finally stretch

[00:13:56] Adam Cox: the relief for the fact, you gotta do that every day.

[00:13:58] Kyle Risi: Every day. And like for so many of the men working the mines wasn't their preferred work. But in rural South Wales, there weren't really that many alternatives. But at the same time, the pits paid really well. And for Gerald and Shirley, like it was especially handy because they were also planning on starting a family very soon.

So it was good money for them. And the thing about coal mining is that it produces an extraordinary amount of waste for every tonne of coal brought up from underground. There's often like close to a tonne of waste. It has to go somewhere, but for years it was simply just piled up on the valley floor near where the mine was actually situated.

But when space ran out, taken it out of the valley literally became too expensive because during World War I, mines were already under increasing pressure to keep costs down and suddenly, especially for Aberfan shifting all of that waste out of the valley literally meant the difference between the mine making money and being forced to close.

[00:14:54] Adam Cox: So it's just heaped up on the mountain side

[00:14:56] Kyle Risi: at this point. It's in the valley floor. The mine isn't actually in the mountain. Mm-hmm. It's actually on the valley floor alongside the village. But because they have run outta space, the Collary now started to move the waste up onto the actual main mountain directly above Abba fan.

So like at this point, this sounds like a classic corporate greed story, but closing the mine, remember that would've left hundreds of local families without an income. So combined with the NCB, that's the, the National Coal Board wanting to obviously stay profitable and local families wanting a livelihood.

This was of course a decision that made a lot of sense to everyone.

[00:15:33] Adam Cox: I guess so. But then equally why move it up? I guess there wasn't any space to put it, I dunno, somewhere else, which was

[00:15:40] Kyle Risi: a level. Yeah. They've already kind of wasted all that space already. It's already been taken up by other mounds.

[00:15:44] Adam Cox: Yeah.

Okay, fine. Fair enough.

[00:15:46] Kyle Risi: So, I mean, it doesn't excuse what happened, but it certainly explains why the cheapest solution kept winning in this situation.

[00:15:53] Adam Cox: Yeah, I get that. And I don't, I mean this is, this is the first kind of an only disaster like this in the UK that I'm aware of.

[00:15:59] Kyle Risi: Certainly the most memorable one.

[00:16:01] Adam Cox: Yeah. I guess no one would've thought putting the up of the mountain would cause a massive landslide.

[00:16:06] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Now to get the coal waste onto the mountain, it was normally transported using mechanical aerial roadways and a tram system before then being dumped into these enormous piles alongside the mountain ridge.

This became basically standard practise in 1916, and by 1966 there were now seven massive cult tips lining the ridge of the mountain directly above Ahan Adam. Each one of these waste tips contained anywhere between 300 and 390,000 metric tonnes of mining waste.

[00:16:37] Adam Cox: I mean. I just said, yeah, I don't see an issue putting up the mountain.

But when it's directly above mm-hmm. A village, maybe they should have thought about it a bit more.

[00:16:45] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Like you might assume that somebody was obviously checking whether or not these waste piles were safe, right? Mm-hmm. But there was no proper system for inspecting any of them or their stability.

Any checks were largely about machinery, like when the cranes could no longer load more weight onto the pile, tipping was just moved to a new pile, basically. So it wasn't about safety at all. It was about can our machines handle the size of the voice tip now?

[00:17:10] Adam Cox: Yeah. And come on, it's the uk, it rains.

[00:17:12] Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly.

That's the thing. But that's not to say that the National Coal Board were blind to the dangers because in 1944, tip number four suffered a major landslide after heavy rain.

[00:17:23] Adam Cox: Oh, so it isn't the first time.

[00:17:26] Kyle Risi: It's not. No. Luckily nobody was hurt, but instead of triggering a proper investigation, they just moved tipping to tip number five.

And once obviously that became too big for the machinery. Tip number six was opened with tip number seven opening up in 1958.

[00:17:42] Adam Cox: Okay. So actually they really should have learned from this

[00:17:45] Kyle Risi: 100%. Yeah. And here's the thing. To the children of Aberam, one man's waist was another man's treasure. Because the tips were perfect playgrounds.

They were dangerous, they were secluded. They were literally irresistible. In the summers, the children often went up the mountain where they would dam some of the natural springs running through the area to make like crude swimming pools. And that's where they would spend most of their summers. Which actually brings us Adam to tip number seven, because when tip number seven opened, the NCB chose a site directly above a network of these natural underground springs and streams.

Essentially, the site they picked was a permanently saturated marshy patcher land. So as the tip grew bigger and heavier, it started acting like an enormous plug to the water that was underneath the water from the springs could no longer drain away properly. It's easiest to escape. Adam, as you can imagine, was upwards into the actual waste itself, saturating the bottom few metres of this giant mount of coal waste.

[00:18:45] Adam Cox: I see. And that's gonna make it unstable.

[00:18:47] Kyle Risi: Exactly. After enough rainfall, the bottom layer essentially turns into a thick, slippery slurry that the rest of the tip was effectively sitting on.

[00:18:56] Adam Cox: Got you.

[00:18:57] Kyle Risi: And the other thing about the warning signs is that tip number four wasn't the only one. With tip number seven being built on this marshland, it had already been a very near miss After a prolonged period of rain in November, 1963, the peak of tip number seven broke off and slid down the mountainside.

It ended up stopping just at its foot, and so nobody was hurt. But Adam, the black scar. That this left down the mountainside was a very visible, very alarming reminder of just how lucky the village was.

[00:19:28] Adam Cox: Yeah. Because if, if only the tip came down, did no one go Well, the whole thing could have come down, then what would've happened.

[00:19:34] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Adam. The thing is though, the local counsellor did complain to the National Coal Board about the slip. They were essentially told however, that they kept making a fuss about safety. That the NCB would likely have no choice but to physically close the mine, which is awful. Right. So this was a threat that many people didn't really want to test because it risk basically their livelihood.

[00:19:57] Adam Cox: Yeah. I still feels negligent.

[00:19:59] Kyle Risi: It so does, but remember at this point, there's no real regulations in place to check the safety of these. I don't even think it was standard practise for coal mines to be storing it up there. It was just the only option that Aberfan had. Right? Mm. And when that was green lit, it was during the wall.

And so like it just ended up that it just wasn't put right. Once the war was over and we came out of the depression from it,

[00:20:22] Adam Cox: yeah. People would just carry on as they were.

[00:20:24] Kyle Risi: But at the same time, even though people could see that this latest slip was troubling, remember the mind staying open was the sole way that people put food in the table.

So you could absolutely imagine how divided the rest of the village would be at this notion of like, well, that's not tested because we don't want the mine to actually close.

[00:20:41] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:42] Kyle Risi: I can understand the human element there. Which Adam brings us back to 9:00 AM on Friday, the 21st of October at Panteras Junior School.

Around 240 children were settling into start their day along Moy Road. Residents were all at different stages of their morning. Some had already left to work pensioners and stay at home moms. They were getting started with their days and miners who had just finished their night shift were now heading upstairs to bed at the school.

At around 9 0 5 8-year-old, Jeff Edwards had just picked out a new book from a collection. His teacher, Mr. Davies, kept on the windowsill at the back of the classroom this week. He decided that he was gonna go with the adventures of Tin Tin. At the same time, in another part of the school dinner, lady, Nancy Williams was going from classroom to classroom, calling students out to the corridor to collect their dinner money for that week.

So it was that sort of thing that they did where you would get your dinner throughout the week and at the end of the week you're bringing your dinner money and then a dinner aid would come along and collect it to kind of settle up the debts for that week. Especially. More important this week, because it's essentially the last day of term.

[00:21:48] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:49] Kyle Risi: It's around nine 10. That dinner lady and Nancy Williams knocks on Miss Hetty Williams' door across the corridor towards the front of the school. That was Ms. Williams' cue to start sending pupils out in an orderly fashion to pay for their dinner money. The first small group included Karen Thomas and four other students.

That's Phil and Allen's cousin. Meanwhile, back across the hall towards the rear of the school in Mr. Ion's class, Robert Jones heard Nancy's knock, and that reminded him that his sister Margaret, over at the senior school, had forgotten to give him his dinner money for the week. And so Robert asked if him and his best friend, Phil Thomas.

Could run over and collect it. So you can imagine what that must be like, right as a kid. Like you've just been given a green card to just leg it out, the school with your best mate.

[00:22:35] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:36] Kyle Risi: So expressions on their face like they've just struck gold. Phil and Robert, they leg it out of the classroom only to slow way down to speak to a few kids sitting on the wall near the school gates.

At this point, Adam, it is 9:15 AM and high. Up on the mountain, the ground beneath Gwen's feet has just suddenly slipped. It kickstarts an avalanche of liquified waist hurtling down the mountain. Phil and Robert say they hear what sounded like a distant jet approaching overhead instinctively. They both look up to see if they could spot it, but of course, Adam through the thick fog, there's literally nothing to see.

Phil says that as the rumble got closer, it stopped sounding like it was overhead and literally started sounding like it was coming from within him. So it's like the ground literally shaking and vibrating.

[00:23:18] Adam Cox: I was gonna say, does he feel the vibrations within him there?

[00:23:22] Kyle Risi: I think so, yeah.

[00:23:23] Adam Cox: I can only imagine.

Does it feel a bit like an earthquake?

[00:23:26] Kyle Risi: Yeah. A lot of people thought it felt like an earthquake as well. Other people felt like it sounded like thunder.

[00:23:32] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:32] Kyle Risi: Then Phil says that suddenly it felt as if someone was actually pelting stones at them through the fog. Robert instinctively ran back towards the school, but Phil, for whatever reason, started running straight ahead up the road a few metres away in one of the houses lining Moy Road.

Gerald Tar was fast asleep after finishing his night shift at the mine. His wife Shirley, at this point had already gone to work and Gerald says that he was suddenly working up by his dog Buster. And he says that when he came round Buster's paws were kind of raised up in the air almost as if he was begging for something.

Gerald assumes that Busta was just scared by the sound of the jet that was passing overhead, and then he kind of reached out to kind of offer him a cuddle. In that moment, the ceiling above his head just opened up to the sky.

[00:24:16] Adam Cox: So what? The roof just come off.

[00:24:18] Kyle Risi: The roof just got swiped off.

[00:24:20] Adam Cox: And how far away is this house from the school?

[00:24:23] Kyle Risi: It's directly across the street.

[00:24:24] Adam Cox: So at this point then the school must have been submerged and then if it's taking off his house?

[00:24:31] Kyle Risi: Yeah,

[00:24:31] Adam Cox: the roof of his house. Wow.

[00:24:33] Kyle Risi: He says then suddenly the entire back wall of his house collapsed in on him, bearing him and Buster beneath it. Gerald immediately loses consciousness.

Meanwhile, as Phil was running away from the noise, the stones that he thought were being pelted at him started turning into literal rocks, and then suddenly one of them struck him in the head, and Phil is knocked unconscious in the street.

[00:24:57] Adam Cox: Wow. So not only is there like this big landslide, you've got all these rocks flying everywhere, almost like it's hailing,

[00:25:05] Kyle Risi: and the thing is that they can't even see what it is.

[00:25:08] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's the weird. I think this fog is really just a bad time to have thick fog right

[00:25:14] Kyle Risi: back inside the school, the children also started hearing the same rumbling sound. Again, like I said, some of 'em thought it was thunder. Others thought again that it was this jet passing over. The instinct again, was just to look out the back windows, but again, the fog meant that there was nothing there to see.

But then suddenly through the fog, this wall of blackness started to emerge. Jeff Edwards says that he saw Mr. Davis's expression, and that literally told him everything that he needed to know. Adam, this was bad. Mr. Davis started screaming for the children to get under the desks, but just as the kids were able to react, the wall slurry crashed through the back of the school, literally through the walls.

They began collapsing inwards into the school, packing them tight with literally thousands and thousands of tonnes of coal waste. Just pack them in.

[00:26:00] Adam Cox: The fact that we know some of these expressions, clearly, some of these people survive.

[00:26:04] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's it.

[00:26:06] Adam Cox: But they are very deep, I'm guessing, within this.

[00:26:09] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Meanwhile, Karen Thomas, who was still in the corridor with Nancy Williams and four other students, says that she remembers glass exploding inwards into the corridor as the walls literally started closing in on them. She says in that moment, Nancy instinctively threw herself between the walls and the children.

Nancy basically took the full brunt of the force as the walls dragged themselves to towards them. God. Across the hall towards the front of the school, Mrs. Hetty Williams, obviously her class hears the noise. They felt the kind of the entire building shake. All she could do was steady herself on her feet and she was like, yeah, it felt like an earthquake.

But then it was just silence. After a couple moments, Hetty then went to look out of the corridor, but when she opened the door, it was almost completely compact with this coal waste right up to the seating with the corridors and walls and rubble just up, up against the classroom.

[00:27:04] Adam Cox: Just a quick question, so I know what we're kind of dealing with here.

Coal waste, because all I can think of is kind of like a mud or a really thick kind of material. Is that right?

[00:27:14] Kyle Risi: Yeah. It depends how saturated it is with water. So we know that a lot of the coal wastes that came tumbling down that mountain, the bottom few metres of it, still thousands of tonnes of it would've turned into with like a slurry.

[00:27:25] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:26] Kyle Risi: But the coal waste that would've been dislodged from the top, that would've been like grit and sand, like a sand consistency, but anywhere from like sand up until big rocks. Mm-hmm. It was anything that the coal mine couldn't process.

[00:27:38] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:38] Kyle Risi: But what is consistent is how black it is. It's essentially coal waste.

[00:27:42] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:27:43] Kyle Risi: But the problem is now that it had hit Hetty Williams class, were completely trapped. Right. When they open up their door, the corridor's completely compact. In that moment. Of course Hesi doesn't want to alarm the kids. So her instincts actually, Adam is really clever. She tries to make it sound like something they really understood.

She tells everyone that this is just a fire drill and that everyone should just line up behind her in single file. So you've got all these kids that have just heard this massive like crash in this earthquake that are now just getting up in single file and lining up behind her. Luckily they're all okay.

And so as Hetty is looking through the door, she's kinda like scraping away some of the, the coal waste and there's a sort of gap in the corridor that she thinks that she might be able to squeeze through to get out of the school. And Adam, she's right, she tells the kids to stay close and then she guides 25 of her students down the corridor and eventually they managed to get outside of the school.

And of course the sad thing is, is that Karen Thomas was in her class, but she's still trapped in the corridor with four other students and Nancy, so she's unaccounted for.

[00:28:44] Adam Cox: Yeah,

[00:28:45] Kyle Risi: Hetty says that once all the children had safety been let out, she turned around and saw the entire back of the western side of the school had been completely engulfed in 30 feet of coal waste.

[00:28:58] Adam Cox: I can't picture that. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm trying to imagine what that might look like. It must just feel like almost the end of the world kind of feeling

[00:29:06] Kyle Risi: when you look at some of the images. They are crazy. You can climb up onto this mound and essentially you are two stories up and you're looking down into the building.

So it's like a big massive ramp, but it's all just engulfed at the school.

[00:29:20] Adam Cox: Yeah. And wow, what a smart teacher just to remain calm like that because I don't think I could sort of think

[00:29:26] Kyle Risi: Yeah, she is amazing.

[00:29:27] Adam Cox: And to have a, I guess the confidence to go right, this is the window. 'cause how'd you know there's not gonna be more to follow or when the right timers could it,

[00:29:35] Kyle Risi: you've gotta risk it, right?

Yeah. You have to the corridor collapsing on you. But she managed to find a little kind of gap. So it did depend where you were in the school. They were kind of closer towards the eastern side of the school, so that was the least affected part of it. But if you were a classroom further down towards the west, even on the front, you would've been completely trapped.

[00:29:54] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:54] Kyle Risi: And that's the thing as well, it's the blackness of the coal as well. It is just so black that when you see images of it, and I appreciate that they're all black and white photographs, it just looks like it's nothing. It's almost like it's a black hole that's just consumed 'cause it's absorbing all the lights so you can't see anything.

[00:30:10] Adam Cox: Mm.

[00:30:10] Kyle Risi: Adam in the aftermath, the coal waste had completely swallowed up 18 houses and the entire back and western side of the Penta Glasss Junior School. At this point, there's just no way of knowing exactly where all the children in the school physically were or whether or not any of them were still alive.

When Phil Thomas wakes up Adam, for him, it is completely dark. After he'd been knocked unconscious, a slab of wall had fallen down on top of him and he ended up being buried, but he also couldn't move at all. So he's not in a predictable place. He's not inside the school where rescue workers are gonna be like, well, they're all inside the school.

He's completely detached from the school. He ran out of the school. Mm. And he's now just buried under this random bit of the street. Where is anyone ever gonna look there?

[00:30:55] Adam Cox: I guess so. Is this a house wall or

[00:30:58] Kyle Risi: a house wall has fallen on him by the sounds of it.

[00:31:00] Adam Cox: I mean, you'd think that they would, but probably not the priority.

[00:31:03] Kyle Risi: Yeah. They're gonna be looking where they believe that people are dwelling, right? Yeah. In bedrooms, in front rooms, in kitchens, et cetera. Not in this random section on the side of someone's front garden.

[00:31:13] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:31:14] Kyle Risi: It's really heartbreaking because he says that when he regained consciousness, the only thing that he could think to do was call for out for his mum.

[00:31:19] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:31:20] Kyle Risi: Inside the school, Karen Thomas remembers how deafening the silence was after the noise. She was still pinned and trapped beneath Nancy at this point. She says that, that the kids started calling out to Nancy, but she didn't respond. Karen managed to kind of wiggle out one of her hands to reach a few strands of Nancy's hair to try and pull it to see if she can get her to wake up, and that is when they knew that Nancy was dead.

All four of the kids were basically trapped under her body.

[00:31:44] Adam Cox: God,

[00:31:45] Kyle Risi: in Jeff's classroom, he did manage to get under a desk just in time, which most definitely saved his life. But Adam, he was pinned beneath his desk, and so he was unable to move and just inches away from his face was the face of one of his classmates.

Adam, she'd been crushed to death and Jeff was just inches away from her face, and that's how he stayed.

[00:32:06] Adam Cox: How and how old are these kids again?

[00:32:08] Kyle Risi: So there were a mixture from very small, so a lot of the younger kids were on the front of the school.

[00:32:13] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:14] Kyle Risi: The older kids, so Jeff's class were between the ages of eight to about 11.

Jeff was eight years old.

[00:32:20] Adam Cox: I mean, that's still, I mean, I class all these, as you know, so young that this is so traumatic and scary for them.

[00:32:26] Kyle Risi: The other classrooms at the front of the school had, like I said, largely escaped the full impact, but just like Hetty's class, they also were trapped. Remember, like I said, if you were kind of towards the western side of that corridor, there would be no way out.

There wouldn't been a gap for you. So teachers, obviously, they just started doing what they could to break through the doors to find any kind of possible route out. So it's mostly the classrooms towards east side of the building where people were able to squeeze along the corridors to reach the assembly hall where they were able to escape.

And that is one of the most awful things about the story. If the school had held their morning assembly as they usually did every day, the vast majority of children, potentially all of them may have survived.

[00:33:08] Adam Cox: That's one of those things like, yeah. In hindsight,

[00:33:12] Kyle Risi: yeah, that's right. In total, 110 children and four teachers, mostly younger students from the classroom towards the front of the school, all managed to get out in the end.

But that did leave 116 other kids pretty much unaccounted for at this moment in time, it's

[00:33:26] Adam Cox: half the school.

[00:33:27] Kyle Risi: Half the school. Yeah. And so Adam, of course. A rescue effort begins. The impact was heard all around the village and almost immediately residents started coming out to see what was happening. One woman later said that when she and the others first arrived, just, everyone just assumed that everyone had gotten out because there were some students out in the front of the school, right?

Mm-hmm. Which you would think that, right? Like your mind doesn't instantly jump to the worst, does it? It was only when someone told them that half the school was still in there. That panic really starts to kind of erupt through the village. Obviously, emergency services, they were called around about 9:25 AM including the fibre grade ambulances and police, but obviously facing what they were about to face.

They didn't have what they needed, like they needed diggers. And so a call was placed to the NCB minors Rescue Service and told to send all the men they could down to Moy Road. And at this point, none of them even knew why they were being sent there. They had no clue.

[00:34:20] Adam Cox: And so they didn't hear what had happened.

Yeah, or like the, the, the vibrations,

[00:34:24] Kyle Risi: I guess no one really understood what they were walking into. A lot of people remember they thought that the sound they heard overhead was just a jet, right?

[00:34:32] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:34:33] Kyle Risi: Even when it was coming down on them, people still thought it was just a jet. Mm-hmm. So people who maybe weren't necessarily alarmed by, they probably would've just let the sound pass and they gone, ah, a jet flew pass.

Right. And like even the fire brigade when they were called, they thought they were just responding to an initial report of a, a collapsed house. The gravity of what they were facing wasn't realised until after they arrived. When they saw that literally 18 houses were just gone.

[00:34:55] Adam Cox: I think as you said, like how are they turning up at the school?

Just not being equipped or know what to even do. Like none of them have trained for this scenario. Sure,

[00:35:03] Kyle Risi: exactly. And it's not even what they're facing. It's also the state of this site as well, like two sections of an entire row of terraces had collapsed in on the people inside. But even beginning any kind of rescue was just a massive logistical challenge because Penas school stood on one side of Moy Road with the row of terraces directly opposite right When the slurry hit.

It of course destroyed the houses on either side of the school, of course impacting through the back of the school. But that debris reached up to 30 feet high. So there's no easy way for the trucks or the equipment to get into the actual site because the school had kind of like blocked a lot of it. The only option was for them to start digging at the edges of each site, which meant it was gonna be a while before they could reach the houses in like the middle, like the nine houses either side.

So that's all they could do. The rescue effort basically split into two with teams working inwards from opposite ends of Moy Road. But by this point, literally everyone in the village was just doing everything they could to help some of the women form like a line picking up bricks one by one, and then passing them down like this convey about stacking them away from the ruins.

But Adam, when you then see images of this scale of this wreckage and you realise that this one little picket line of a bunch of women just passing one brick to each other to get it out of the rubble site just makes you realise like how fruitless that was.

[00:36:31] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:31] Kyle Risi: Like the scale of it. We're talking 110,000 tonnes,

[00:36:35] Adam Cox: I

[00:36:35] Kyle Risi: guess, of this rubble.

[00:36:36] Adam Cox: It's people that just wanna feel like they're doing something and I imagine,

[00:36:39] Kyle Risi: yeah, it's not even about that. It's not about wanting to, you have to do something.

[00:36:42] Adam Cox: Yeah. And perhaps initially you don't really know what's the best way to tackle this, but I imagine like it's the whole community. It's the town all pulling together and at this moment in time, and in some ways that must be for those that are concerned about their children or whatever, in some ways that must be comforting that they're all in it trying to solve this.

I guess they're just trying not to think of the worst.

[00:37:05] Kyle Risi: Eventually the miners arrive, they climb up onto the coal mount towards the back of the school, and basically they start frantically digging anywhere that might lead them to an opening into the building. And Adam, it's a literal race against a clock, because unless a child had somehow been trapped inside an air pocket, they were at serious risk of suffocating.

But also the impact had fractured two large water mains that were now sending thousands of gallons of water pouring into the debris, turning it into a sloppy quicksand.

[00:37:33] Adam Cox: God, it's, it's always, it just always gets worse, doesn't it?

[00:37:36] Kyle Risi: By this point, of course, news had reached Phil's brother, Alan, who is now running towards Panteras court to see if Phil was okay, but the burst water main had formed like a thick slurry of river travelling across the road.

On the other side of that road, Alan sees his mom, who had come to obviously see what was happening. She's completely blocked from getting across the road, but when Alan tells her that he didn't know if Phil was okay, she doesn't hesitate. She just literally waved right through that river to reach him on the other end.

And that's like mother's protective instinct, right? Mm-hmm. Like kicking in that moment.

[00:38:09] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like I don't think you think, right? You just do.

[00:38:12] Kyle Risi: No, you're like my son. My son's in danger. I need to find him. What neither of them knew, of course, is that Phil wasn't even in the school at that point. Phil is actually buried beneath the wall of debris that has obviously crashed down on top of him at the very edge of the actual site.

And honestly, Adam, he is incredibly lucky to have fallen where he did, because had he landed just a couple feet further back, nobody would've had any reason to start pulling rubble from that particular spot. As we mentioned, the only reason anyone realised Phil was underneath it was because his feet were just barely poking out.

[00:38:43] Adam Cox: Oh, wow. That's lucky.

[00:38:45] Kyle Risi: But of course, nobody could pull him out because he's firmly pinned under this wall. Even worse, Adam, the Slurry river caused by the burst water mains was now pouring into the space around Phil.

[00:38:55] Adam Cox: So it is a race against time to get him out.

[00:38:58] Kyle Risi: That's it. While the firefighters fought to lift the wall up, another firefighter was trying to fight to keep his head up above water.

Eventually it takes six people to lift the slab high enough for someone to pull Phil free.

[00:39:11] Adam Cox: So how high is the water at that point?

[00:39:14] Kyle Risi: It's not even about that. It's about where it's flowing into, right? Yeah. So if he's on a little bit of a slope, then it's gonna go where the lowest point is.

[00:39:21] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:22] Kyle Risi: They say that if it was just a few minutes longer, he would've drowned.

But had they not spotted him, he would've been gone, right?

[00:39:28] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:39:28] Kyle Risi: Phil is actually one of the first people to be pulled alive from what looks like literally at this point, an impossible rescue site. I cannot stress enough. To just take a moment to just Google the wreckage site. It's just gar Tuit. It's a huge site and it just makes you think, well, how is anyone gonna survive this?

[00:39:48] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. But then pulling fill out, does that give people hope and determination to go Right, we've got one. Let's go again.

[00:39:55] Kyle Risi: 100%. Especially as they start pulling more survivors, every survivor that gets pulled out is a little bit of hope for the parents that are waiting.

[00:40:03] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:03] Kyle Risi: But Adam, the second there is someone dead that they pull out, what does that do to the parents that are waiting?

So it's like this rollercoaster of emotion that you're going through.

[00:40:12] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:12] Kyle Risi: It's heartbreaking. While all of this is happening, Gerald Tar, who's house had obviously collapsing on him, he regains consciousness. The only thing he could hear was basically the sound of Rapids. As water was rushing in on the site, part of his bedroom door crushed down on top of him and it kind of crushed his shoulder underneath it.

He could hear rescue workers shouting down at him from above. And you remember someone yelling that if they couldn't get him out, that he was going to drown.

[00:40:37] Adam Cox: Oh my God.

[00:40:37] Kyle Risi: And he talks about how he tried to claw at the door. He pulled so hard that he could feel his fingernails putting away from his fingers.

So that's like desperation in that moment, right? Like knowing that this is a matter of life and death.

[00:40:49] Adam Cox: Yeah. Does it work though?

[00:40:51] Kyle Risi: Well, eventually Rescuers managed to reach Gerald. They managed to kind of fit a jack, which allows him to kind of raise the door just enough to kind of slip him out, as well as obviously a crushed shoulder.

Gerald has a broken pelvis and he suffers like really severe head injuries. Adam. Sadly, Buster doesn't make it. He died. But Adam, he's a fucking hero because of Buster hadn't woken him up. Jared might not have even gotten outta bed. Right. If that wall have fallen down on him, he may have died.

[00:41:19] Adam Cox: Yeah, and I guess he was somewhat conscious when this all happened, right?

And then That's right.

[00:41:23] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[00:41:24] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:41:24] Kyle Risi: Back in the school, firefighters and miners were slowly inching the way into the buried classroom, Adam. They were effectively tunnelling through these rooms, and while they were tunnelling, they would routinely come up against like a piece of furniture, like a cabinet or a desk.

But of course, you can't just start digging around it because that's just a complete waste of time. So they literally have to smash through the desk or the cabinet that's in their way to allow them to keep going. The harsh reality of that is that by not digging around it, they could be potentially missing someone else who's literally just there.

Mm-hmm. Because either side of these, these tunnels that they're digging, there could be literally just a person inches away.

[00:42:04] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:42:05] Kyle Risi: At this point, Jeff Edwards, he's still pinned under his desk. He's obviously face to face with his dead classmates. He starts to hear kind of voices inching closer and closer, and then suddenly he feels like a shovel cut through the slurry and hits him in the shoulder.

This causes him to scream, but Adam, it alerts the diggers that he's physically there.

[00:42:25] Adam Cox: I dunno, you must be kind of grateful in a way, right?

[00:42:27] Kyle Risi: Yeah, I'm happy with that, but it's awful to think, because you gotta remember, there were kids that were unable to let anyone know that they were there. Right. Some of them would've been deceased.

So you can imagine like some of these miners would be literally hitting their shovel into an actual body that was on the other side, or someone who was unable to scream.

[00:42:46] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:42:47] Kyle Risi: Some of the survivors actually described the moment when the rescues would break through and the light and fresh air would just start flooding in describing it as like just something out of this world, which I get right.

Especially if you've been buried under there for two hours.

[00:42:59] Adam Cox: Is that how long at this point?

[00:43:00] Kyle Risi: Oh, Jeff Edwards was buried on for two hours. Some people were buried for as long as 10 hours all day. Some of them people never even were found.

[00:43:09] Adam Cox: I imagine just like if you're trapped under this slurry, I imagine there's this warmth or whatever, the heat building, I can imagine it feeling quite stuffy and

[00:43:17] Kyle Risi: Oh yeah.

100%. So you feel like a coolness of the air hit in your face,

[00:43:20] Adam Cox: and that must be so welcoming. Yeah.

[00:43:22] Kyle Risi: Jeff is rescued around about 11:00 AM after being buried for close to two hours when in orders pulled outta the rubble. They were then taken to like a triage area on the school playground where they could either get medical assistance or the body's basically just processed, really wrapped up in, in a sheet or a body bag, which is awful, like having the two things close together.

Right. The survivors and obviously the people who had died. Eventually rescuers Adam. They do reach Karen Thomas and the four other children that were trapped in the corridor. Remember, they were still trapped under Nancy Williams, the dinner lady, Karen sustained internal bleeding. And Adam, she's in a very bad way.

Paramedics have to basically stabilise her body with bandages from her, literally her neck to her feet, just to keep her still. And then she's taken to hospital via ambulance. At that point, Adam, she, I don't think she knows that Nancy was dead. Mm-hmm. That she was, she probably just thought that she was unconscious.

[00:44:17] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:44:18] Kyle Risi: By 11:00 AM News of obviously what had happened had spread nationally. Hundreds of people were now travelling to Appan to help emergency services from nearby towns. Miners from other colleagues, but also just ordinary members of the public were just volunteering their time to come down and just do anything they could.

At around 11:30 AM it finally managed to shut off the water from the two burst mains. By this point, Adam, the water had made like large parts of the site just dangerously unstable, and the slurry had lost so much of its integrity that it was now turning to like a kind of soup. If there were any pockets beneath the desks or the cabinets where people were trapped or hiding, the water was now just flooding into that.

Like it was just not stable enough. Finding survivors basically becomes harder and harder because of, it's because A, they'd probably run out of oxygen or they'd end up being buried in the soup.

[00:45:09] Adam Cox: I guess you just think if it wasn't for the water, would this have, I dunno, made it

[00:45:14] Kyle Risi: so many circumstances that you would say, if this hadn't happened?

[00:45:18] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:45:18] Kyle Risi: Would things have ended differently?

[00:45:19] Adam Cox: Yeah. The sequence of events for this to happen, I guess you just couldn't really predict it or, yeah.

[00:45:25] Kyle Risi: It's difficult to know what to say when we're going through this, but these were the actual lived realities of some of these people that live through this, and it is just heartbreaking.

[00:45:34] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:34] Kyle Risi: I don't think I would be able to cope as well as some of these kids have coped, especially years later when we hear about what happened to Phil after he got rescued. Like I would just be broken.

[00:45:43] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:45:43] Kyle Risi: Early on, rescuers would follow basically the faint screams and cries, but Adam, once the people nearest the back had been reached, any remaining sounds from deep inside were basically being dampened by the surrounding waste that was impacting them.

So you couldn't really hear it. It's like being in the studio where kind of the, any noise that you make gets absorbed by the acoustic panels. That's essentially what the waste was acting like. So you could be screaming as loud as you could, but it was just being absorbed into the waste

[00:46:12] Adam Cox: and no one's gonna be able to hear you.

Yeah. Or know exactly where you are.

[00:46:15] Kyle Risi: That's right. To deal with this, the miners came up with the system that they would basically move as much waste as they could for a few minutes, and then suddenly someone would blow a whistle and then the entire site would just completely stop. Like hundreds of people, including machinery, everything.

And then they would just listen for even the faintest sound coming from beneath the rubble. If they heard anything that told them, obviously where they needed to keep digging, but if they didn't, then just the digging would then start again. So it was really effective because through that, as they inch closer and closer in, they could then start to hear some of the screens that were coming from within the school.

[00:46:51] Adam Cox: And so when they do hear something, is it a case of I found someone no one else, like dig or ever, let's just get this person out or whatever?

[00:46:58] Kyle Risi: Possibly. Yes, that's right. And then they would dig again. So they had all these different teams digging, but that's essentially how they had, 'cause remember, it's like finding a needle in the haystack.

Where do you dig when you have this three dimensional room, this classroom? Like you could be digging up, you could be digging down, you could be digging, where do you dig?

[00:47:15] Adam Cox: It's amazing when I sometimes think that humans are put under that pressure what they can do quite quickly to take control the best they can of the situation.

[00:47:24] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Humans are amazing in that sense.

[00:47:26] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:47:27] Kyle Risi: Adam, eventually, most of the children being pulled out were already dead because I guess they'd been buried for so long that they suffocated or they'd end up drowning. Or

[00:47:37] Adam Cox: being crushed.

[00:47:38] Kyle Risi: Or being crushed. Yeah. Adam, many of them were still at their desks, like the fog had given them very little time to react, but the deeper the rescuers got into the school, also, the slower the work became.

Like you couldn't just dump the waste to the side because that might be dumping it near where another child might be trapped just inches away. So if every shovel of debris had to be carried back and dumped somewhere clear of the rescue site, but even then, it was so harder because every time you cleared a small section, debris from above would just slide down and fill the space that you'd already dug.

[00:48:10] Adam Cox: It's like quick sand almost.

[00:48:12] Kyle Risi: You could literally dig two feet of ground and then lose three. Mm-hmm. It was just, it felt almost pointless. A volunteer named Alan. He talks about how while he was digging, he came across two little girls that were folded over their desks. And he says one of them had a blonde ponytail, just like his 4-year-old daughter.

And for him that was it. And he just broke down. And Alan says that his team dug for 10 hours and all they managed to recover were four small girls and their teacher. That is just how fruitless what they were doing felt, because it was literally like digging for a needle in a haystack. 'cause how do you know where to dig, right?

[00:48:50] Adam Cox: Yeah. But then that's, I guess it's one of those, look, they did take part and they did recover bodies at least that can give the parents some comfort.

[00:48:59] Kyle Risi: Yeah. But you also gotta think about all the guilt that's wrapped up in that as well. Digging for 10 hours. You're probably so exhausted that this feeling that if you stopped, could that time where you weren't digging, could you have found someone?

Do you know what I mean? So a lot of these people, these volunteers that are digging, trying to find these bodies, they're also dealing with that lifelong guilt of, well, what if, right?

[00:49:21] Adam Cox: And when do you stop? When do you call it? A day? Once if you stayed for another hour. Yeah.

[00:49:26] Kyle Risi: Meanwhile, obviously outside the school, parents are literal, just waiting for any news that their child was okay.

And honestly, reading about this, there's almost something really unbearable about the way it unfolded, because waiting becomes its own sort of torment for these parents. The cycle of dread and hope, like every time a child would be carried out, alive, somewhere in that crowd, a mother or a father would break down with relief, which in effect, that gives everyone else this insane level of hope that their child would then be next.

But then Adam, another child would be brought out and this time they wouldn't be alive. And so you would then kind of watch a whole another set of parents collapse, and that would then just crush everyone else's hope. Thinking like, well, if they're now finding dead people, then my child's gonna be next, and they could likely be dead.

[00:50:12] Adam Cox: It must feel like a roulette almost.

[00:50:15] Kyle Risi: With every rescue. It became this horrifying cycle where people were trapped between hope and dread. It's just heartbreaking.

[00:50:22] Adam Cox: I guessing the longer the operation goes on, it's less likely to find people alive.

[00:50:28] Kyle Risi: Marilyn Brown was one of those parents desperately waiting to hear whether or not her daughter, Janet had been rescued.

Her husband, Bernard had literally been digging all day, Adam, but eventually he reaches a point where he physically cannot continue. At that point, they still hadn't found Janet. All he could do is just wait. Which again, in itself, like I said, is its own sort of torment, right? Mm-hmm. If it wasn't for my body, like giving up on me, I would still be able to dig.

And so that's probably something that he lived with for the rest of his life, knowing that he had to stop digging.

[00:51:00] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[00:51:01] Kyle Risi: So together, Marilyn and Bernard, they all they could do is just watch children. Me pulled out the rubble, like Marilyn got to the point where she can't face finding out whether or not any of the bodies or any of the children being had been pulled out were Janet.

And so each time she would send Bernard to go and check when she sent Bernard to look at the last collection of kids that had been brought out, Bernard came back and basically he had tears in his eyes. Marilyn knew exactly what that meant, but still she asked him hopefully whether or not Janet was okay.

[00:51:32] Adam Cox: I think until you hear those words, you just, you can see all the signs I think, in that situation and know and like in your heart what's happened. But I feel like you need someone to tell it to you before you can accept it.

[00:51:46] Kyle Risi: And so I guess for Bernard, a part of him believed that if he hadn't been forced to stop, he might have been the one to find her.

Right. So I can't imagine the guilt that he was left with or because basically his body just simply gave out. Later when Marilyn wanted to see Janet's body, Bernard insisted that she didn't, all he told her was that Janet just had a small mark on her head and that she just looked like she was sleeping, which I think for Marilyn's own sanity, I guess that's the thing that she accepted.

But to be told to not go and see her, I think that told a very different story about how horrific Janet's injuries may have been.

[00:52:22] Adam Cox: Yeah. Do you think he was trying to shield her from

[00:52:25] Kyle Risi: 100%? Oh yeah. I think so. 'cause otherwise, if she did look like she was sleeping, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't afford Marilyn the opportunity to go and see her.

But he's told her not to.

[00:52:38] Adam Cox: Yeah, that's true. You think, ah God, what if that's just Janet? What about the other kids?

[00:52:44] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's right. And so Adam, at the end of their first day, 60 bodies had been pulled from the school. They found no more survivors after that. Eventually 144 people were confirmed dead. 28 of those were adults and 116 of those were children.

Among them was of course headmistress, Ann Jennings, whose body was literally the last to be recovered by rescuers, which is strangely symbolic in a kind of way. It's almost like the caps going down with a ship.

[00:53:13] Adam Cox: That was just what I was thinking. Yeah. It must be some weird coincidence that it happened like that.

[00:53:18] Kyle Risi: And that's the thing. Anne was incredibly well respected and loved by the children and also throughout the community. And although she had lived a full adult life, like I believe at that point she was into her sixties, maybe seventies. Some of the teachers who died just like the children had literally their whole lives ahead of them, like had barely begun.

Mrs. Marge Re, she was only 22, she'd only just be married that summer. And Heti talks about how that week. She'd been talking about them starting her own family.

[00:53:48] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:48] Kyle Risi: Of course, while the people of Aberfan were still trying to understand the scale of what they had lost. The rest of Britain were also now begin to see it.

But the tragedy became this international story with all these vivid images of these miners digging through the rubble, parents literally waiting outside the chapel for news. And of course bodies being carried from the school. And the response was enormous. Like complete strangers were coming to this village to help these people that they didn't even know, which is deeply reassuring for humanity's capacity, for compassion.

[00:54:21] Adam Cox: And I think 'cause of school, it's at the centre of this tragedy as well. It's just, I think any,

[00:54:28] Kyle Risi: anything that in involves children is going to attract a lot of community support.

[00:54:34] Adam Cox: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:54:35] Kyle Risi: On the day of the disaster, the mayor launches the Abberant Disaster Fund simply to handle all the donations that were beginning to flood in, not just from across Britain, but literally from around the world.

Like people literally sent anything they could. They were receiving envelopes out with loose change inside them, just a few pennies. That's all they could afford. But they felt that obviously the community of Abberant needed it more. Mm-hmm.

[00:54:57] Adam Cox: By

[00:54:58] Kyle Risi: the time the fund closes, they'd received nearly 88,000 separate donations, which raised around 1.75 million pounds, which Adam is the equivalent of 30 million pounds today.

It's huge.

[00:55:09] Adam Cox: Yeah. Wow.

[00:55:11] Kyle Risi: Just six days later, on the 27th of October at the fan, they began burying the dead. The funerals drew tens of thousands of people and in that first procession, 81 children and one adult were laid to rest in these two really long communal graves.

[00:55:28] Adam Cox: Is it just one big like grave or are they individual?

Yeah,

[00:55:32] Kyle Risi: that's right. So it's just two big, massive graves that they dug and they just laid the coffin side by side. But Adam, today it is just beautiful, right. The graves are all marked with like two rows of these stunning marble arches, each with a stone bearing kind of one of the victim's names. And it's the funeral footage that really gets me.

'cause when you see the cemetery from a distance, these two really long rows of these graves, like in these arches, just suddenly shows you the scale of kind of the loss. And that was only 81 of them. Like it wasn't all of the kids. So we also need to talk about the Queen for a second. Of course. If you watch the third season of the Crown, you'll probably remember them covering Abba Fan in one of the episodes and how the Queen obviously came under a tonne of scrutiny for not visiting in the immediate aftermath.

[00:56:17] Adam Cox: I can't remember why. Did she come under such scrutiny? Is it because the royal family at the time weren't necessarily in the sort of most favourable position within the public?

[00:56:26] Kyle Risi: No. I think this is one of the things that tipped them over into that. The Queen obviously has a very famous reputation of coming across quite cold, especially when it comes to showing emotion in public.

[00:56:37] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:38] Kyle Risi: Yeah. And I was kind of in two minds about whether or not to include the controversy surrounding the Queen, only because I wanted to tell the story of Aberfan rather than spending too much time on like what was happening around it. But also for the families of Abberant. I honestly don't think they cared either way, especially considering what they were already dealing with.

[00:56:55] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like for some, maybe it's comforting, but yeah, they've probably got other things on their mind.

[00:57:00] Kyle Risi: But basically in the aftermath of the disaster, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson at the time, he ended up visiting Abberant and it was this that kind of made the wider public start questioning why the Queen hadn't done the same thing.

However, the Palace did send a representative in Lord Snowden, that's the queen's brother-in-law, but this visit didn't attract nearly as much media attention.

[00:57:22] Adam Cox: I guess. It's almost like, why are you sending him, why are you not visiting yourself? This is actually like a UK disaster.

[00:57:29] Kyle Risi: The thing is though, they sent Ross Snowden for that very reason.

'cause they knew that it wouldn't attract too much media attention. Like the Queen's concern was that a visit from her would inevitably become a major event in itself.

[00:57:41] Adam Cox: Ah.

[00:57:42] Kyle Risi: Like it would require security press officials, crowds would come and gather as well. All of that would have to be managed at the time when rescuers were still desperately trying to reach the children beneath the rubble.

[00:57:52] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like they're not gonna stop. To shake her hand, see? Yeah.

[00:57:56] Kyle Risi: And so her thinking was that was the most respectful thing she could do in those first few days was to basically just stay away and not risk becoming a distraction from the rescue efforts. But of course in the media this looks extraordinarily bad, especially when the coverage is contrast between images of miners digging through the rubble, literally with their bare hands.

In some cases with footage of Buckingham Palace suggesting that the queen is sitting comfortably inside.

[00:58:22] Adam Cox: It's one of those things where it's almost like she's damned if she does. Yeah. Damned if she doesn't, because actually now you explain it, it makes like logical sense. She could come visit in a week or whatever on something like that to pay her respects.

[00:58:34] Kyle Risi: And the thing is that this is such a big story, but again, I don't think that the people of Aberfan even cared. Right. Eventually though the Queen and Philip, they do visit on the 29th of October. It's like eight days later or something, but years later, she apparently said that delaying her visit was one of the greatest regrets of her reign, which I'm not sure how to take because I agree that it wasn't appropriate for her to go and visit Aberfan.

So I'm in two minds what she's regretting. Exactly. Was it not visiting sooner or was it the damage that the decision did to her reputation?

[00:59:08] Adam Cox: Oh, I see. Yeah. I dunno. I mean, she did visit like she did. Maybe she like what would she have done? She like if she did get there sooner,

[00:59:16] Kyle Risi: if she did get there sooner, she would of course a distraction.

[00:59:19] Adam Cox: Yeah. Like she's just gonna tell people, I'm sorry, or we are thinking of you. That's not what they need at that point.

[00:59:25] Kyle Risi: Yeah. Her visit does end up being a massive thing. She goes and does some visits with some of the families personally. She meets some of the crowd, they give her flowers and all that stuff, but I'm not really gonna go into it 'cause I didn't really think it was that important.

However, following the disaster, the natural thing that people wanted to know was who was responsible for this? And honestly, Adam, the answer is not complicated. It's the National Cold Board. Quite frankly, in the aftermath, the government established a tribunal which heard from 136 witnesses. They reviewed a huge amounts of evidence showing that actually the NCB.

Had been aware of the risks of dumping waste on that mount side the whole time, which I mean is not a surprise to us because we already covered some of that.

[01:00:06] Adam Cox: Yeah. And the fact that they had some like near misses beforehand.

[01:00:09] Kyle Risi: Exactly. The report was eventually published in August of 1967 and basically unanimously found that based on the ncbs conduct, the disaster could and should have been prevented.

[01:00:22] Adam Cox: Yeah. And I guess like no one would've thought, okay, this is gonna be as severe as this, but they knew that the landslide was possible. Why did you just not either look for new land or make sure there was security or measures in place to just make sure it doesn't slip down the mountain?

[01:00:37] Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yeah.

However, in the lead up to the report's findings, the NCB always maintained that ABBERANT was an unforeseeable natural event blaming the unprecedented amount of rain that had fallen in the weeks beforehand. But at the tribunal, they found that simply wasn't true because the report showed that Tip seven had of course been deliberately built on a set of natural springs.

And before settling on that particular site, the NCB would've had access to ordinance, survey maps showing that the springs existed and that maps were readily available. So they should have had access to them. And so it was very likely that the NCB had seen them and yet they still chose to put tip seven where Tip seven was.

Mm-hmm. And it's probably because they probably had kind of tram rails very close to the site anyway. They're like, we just needs to build like another 20 metres or 30 metres a railway track to reach the site rather than going, is this actually the best site?

[01:01:37] Adam Cox: Yeah. So almost lazy money saving, all that sort of stuff.

[01:01:41] Kyle Risi: I think money and corporate greed is at the centre of this for sure. But here's the thing though, like they denied that they knew anything about the, the maps. But the thing is that the people of Aberfan knew about those springs, or literally generations, like their parents were swimming in those springs and their parents' parents were swimming in those springs.

[01:02:00] Adam Cox: I'm surprised, although, you know, it was 60 years ago that they were allowed to build on springs. Like surely they not. You know, they should be protected it's natural water.

[01:02:09] Kyle Risi: Well, the fact that they're mentioning that they should have known about the springs would suggest that they should have known it was a danger.

Right?

[01:02:16] Adam Cox: Yeah. And also it's like a natural spring. Like why would you want to put co coal on that?

[01:02:20] Kyle Risi: Sure. True, true. Because again, that water's gotta flow somewhere, right? So where's it gonna go? It's just gonna be saturated. All this coal waste and it's gonna go into the river.

[01:02:28] Adam Cox: Yeah.

[01:02:28] Kyle Risi: But also the report points to remember the slips in 1944 and 1963.

Yet in the lead up to the report, the NCB denied knowing anything about those slips. They denied them,

[01:02:41] Adam Cox: but it was their slips, was it not?

[01:02:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah. The tribunal also heard from the local counsellors and they reviewed all the documentation proving that they had already raised concerns after those slips only for the NCB to basically threaten the mine with closure if the counsellors continue to cause a fuss.

[01:02:59] Adam Cox: Exactly.

[01:03:00] Kyle Risi: The inquiry also found that basic checks around drainage and stability weren't being done. The NCB were also putting people in charge of jobs that they weren't qualified to perform. So then they were like, I know you're an administrator, you can just go do the job of an engineer or whatever, go assess the site.

They weren't putting the right people in the right jobs

[01:03:19] Adam Cox: and Okay, so apart from the people high up, those that worked for the NCB that are perhaps lower down, your everyday man did, they must have felt some level of guilt about this, right?

[01:03:29] Kyle Risi: Oh Adam, you gotta remember a lot of these people that works as mine are AAN villagers.

[01:03:34] Adam Cox: Exactly. It's their guilt children or

[01:03:36] Kyle Risi: whatever. It's their children. That's the thing that makes us all come crumbling down. But the point is, is that the report doesn't point the finger at any one person. Instead, it found that the entire NCB system was at fault cost cutting that it started basically from World War I and it hardened over the decades into like a normal way of working.

Mm-hmm. But also the actions of the NCB Chairman, Lord Rubins really doesn't look good in all of this. Apparently while the disaster was unfolding, rather than going to Aberfan to at least, he might not necessarily need to like help in the rescue effort. He just needs to be there. Like it's his coal mine that's done this.

He decided to attend his formal installationist chancellor of the University of Surrey instead. So he knew this was happening as like, but I've got an appointment and they're honouring me, so I'm just gonna go.

[01:04:25] Adam Cox: So piece of scum.

[01:04:26] Kyle Risi: Absolutely. So he was getting a promotion. He didn't wanna miss it. Basically when he finally does show up, he basically spends his time telling reporters that the disaster had been caused by a spring inside the tip that nobody could have possibly known about.

But of course the people of AB fan already knew that wasn't true. So as pressure from the investigation mounted, the tribunals started interviewing employees from the mine. Obviously, he couldn't get them to keep their story straight and most of them refuse to lie. After all. Remember it's their family members.

Mm-hmm. It's their community members that were affected. And so by day 65 of the investigation, Ruben starts slowly backtracking and he acknowledges that actually the geological conditions could have been recognised in advance, and in the end, the National Coal Board was found responsible. However, not a single person was prosecuted,

[01:05:17] Adam Cox: so what they just got fined or

[01:05:20] Kyle Risi: not even that, like the Attorney General said that there wasn't enough evidence to justify criminal proceedings, which is bollocks.

The actual problem is that the law in England at the time wasn't set up to easily prosecute a large organisation for manslaughter. The law needs prosecutors to be able to attach a guilty state of mind to a particular individual, and because of course it was a systemic failure, there was no single person that they could criminally hold accountable, even though Ruben's was the chairman of the NCB and ultimately the guy at the top calling the shots

[01:05:54] Adam Cox: and responsible.

[01:05:55] Kyle Risi: Yeah, in the aftermath, Lord Rubins, he does offer to resign, but the Minister of Power, Richard Marsh, refuses to accept it. This guy's like, you've got nothing to worry about. No one's found you criminally responsible, you should keep your job. So it's like, oh, we're we're too big, rich guys. Let's scratch each other's back.

[01:06:12] Adam Cox: I thought it was more of a case of you're not getting out of it this easy.

[01:06:14] Kyle Risi: No, no. You need to

[01:06:15] Adam Cox: right the wrong.

[01:06:16] Kyle Risi: The right thing for him to have done was to resign. He should have insisted, but now he was like getting this Lord Marsh guy to say, no, no, you don't need to resign. He is like affirmations, like reassurance.

[01:06:26] Adam Cox: You're fine,

[01:06:27] Kyle Risi: you're fine.

[01:06:28] Adam Cox: Continue taking your big paycheck.

[01:06:30] Kyle Risi: Adam, this caused so much outrage across the UK that mps debated the issue in Parliament where these fuckers genuinely argued that being publicly named and shamed by the tribunal was punishment enough.

[01:06:42] Adam Cox: No, no, it's not.

[01:06:43] Kyle Risi: Try telling that to the hundreds of families who had just lost a child.

It's disgusting. Following the tribunal, the cold board was ordered to compensate the affected families. Adam, its first offer was 50 quid.

[01:06:59] Adam Cox: I mean, even in money back then, I, that doesn't seem anywhere near enough.

[01:07:03] Kyle Risi: This equivalent number 800 quid isn't that awful. Obviously, nobody accepted and eventually was increased to 500 pounds, which is equivalent to 8,000 pounds today, which is nuts considering that public had donated the equivalent close to 30 million pounds because they believe the families in the village would need support for the rest of their lives.

And all the coal board can come up with is epoxy 500 pounds. It's horrendous.

[01:07:28] Adam Cox: That is shocking.

[01:07:29] Kyle Risi: However, the cold board, they also make it very difficult for any of the families to access that money needlessly. So they thought that they could potentially save some money by convincing the trust in charge of distributing that money to evaluate each family member and their relationship to the victim.

What does that mean? Simple. Ask the parents how close they actually were to their dead child. No, I'm not even joking. Like how naughty was Lucy? Did you like her very much? Did she ever steal your makeup without you knowing? It's fucking wild.

[01:08:03] Adam Cox: I am really shocked by that. It's like are, do you have a, do you have any other children?

Oh, you've got two more. Oh, that's okay. Then you don't need this money.

[01:08:10] Kyle Risi: Exactly. You've got other children. Like surely your love must have been spread across the three of 'em. Right? That

[01:08:14] Adam Cox: is disgusting.

[01:08:15] Kyle Risi: It's awful. Thankfully the trustees, they're like L no, that's disgusting. And Adam, that's not even the west part, but the people of Abba fan, of course, they wanted the remaining tips removed from the mountain because of course they didn't wanna be reminded every single day of the pain that these things are caused.

[01:08:32] Adam Cox: And the worry that could have happened again.

[01:08:34] Kyle Risi: Exactly. But the NCB said it was too expensive. In the end, the government ordered the tips to be removed, but allowed the NCB to use the equivalent of 2.5 million pounds from the publicly donated money in the Aberfan Fund to pay for it. So basically, the public money of people who had donated their change from down the side of the sofa, everything they could muster was used to pay for the removal of the ncbs waist tips that caused this in the first place.

[01:09:06] Adam Cox: I'm not really liking the NCB right now.

[01:09:08] Kyle Risi: So as you can imagine, Adam surviving Aberfan did not mean the disaster was over. When Phil Thomas was rescued, his injuries were really horrific. His ear was almost completely torn off, and the wall had fallen and crushed one of his hands. Doctors were able to save his ear, but they had to amputate three of his fingers.

Phil talks about the moment that he realised that this had happened to him. He says that the nurses were lovely and reassuring telling him that everything was fine. But then when they came to change his bandages, that was the first time that he properly saw his hand. And he says he just cried.

[01:09:42] Adam Cox: Well, he's a little boy.

[01:09:43] Kyle Risi: Yeah,

[01:09:43] Adam Cox: and he's just. Got a deal with that.

[01:09:46] Kyle Risi: He says that when his brother, Alan came to visit him in hospital, the last time that he had seen Phil was as Phil and Karen had disappeared into the fog that morning as they spit off. The first thing Phil did was show Alan his hand, like he had. He's quite resilient little boy.

He had come to terms with it, but like Alan was like, that's all right. That's not a problem. And it's just because Alan was just grateful that they were together again.

[01:10:09] Adam Cox: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like it could have been a lot worse

[01:10:12] Kyle Risi: and decades later reflecting on losing his fingers field says I wouldn't have it any other way.

In fact, he is, I have no idea what I'd do if I had 10 of him.

In the documentary, you see footage of him like playing with his best mate, Robert. They're firing a slingshot as if nothing is wrong. But you just see his like little, those little dinosaur fingers just grabbing and flicking it. It's just kids are just so resilient and this is a perfect reminder of that.

[01:10:38] Adam Cox: Yeah, I think he's got a lifetime to get used to that and he won't know anything different.

[01:10:42] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's it. As for Gerard Tar, like I said, he had a broken pelvis and he had crushed his shoulder. When Shirley first saw him on hospital, he describes how she broke down in the state that he was in. But Gerard was like, Shirley, at least I'm alive.

[01:10:58] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:58] Kyle Risi: Like, which is fair, like they'd lost their entire street. It'd been wiped out. Think of all the children that had lost their lives as well. Gerard and Shirley, they do eventually go off and have their own child, but having their own child only remind him every day of the children who had died that day.

So I know they weren't connected, but he would look at his child and just go,

[01:11:16] Adam Cox: I guess the uh, like what must the other parents be going through?

[01:11:19] Kyle Risi: That's right. Which is rough. He says, if going through the disaster again meant he could save just one of them, he would do it a dozen times over. Karen Thomas, she also survived, but she lost a kidney, which is okay.

She's got two. But she says that she never forgot that Nancy Williams had given her life to save hers. Jeff Edwards, he survives physically, but he says a memory of his dead classmate never leaves him for years afterwards. He just suffers recurring nightmares where he would always see her face.

[01:11:48] Adam Cox: Oh.

[01:11:48] Kyle Risi: Which really?

Yeah. Jeff actually goes on to become the mayor of Aberfan.

[01:11:54] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:11:54] Kyle Risi: Yeah. He's the centenary mayor, which I dunno what that means. Does it mean after the a hundred years of Avan being AAN that they made him like a ceremonial mayor? I'm not sure how it works.

[01:12:06] Adam Cox: Does he get to do mad duties?

[01:12:08] Kyle Risi: I think so. He uses his position as a respected figure in the community and as a survivor to go off and tell new generations about what had happened.

And the stark reality is that out of his class of 34, Jeff was only one of four survivors.

[01:12:22] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:12:23] Kyle Risi: After the disaster was agreed that everyone should try and get back to a sense of normality as quickly as possible, the following year they set up a temporary school in the local village club. Hettie Williams says, on their first day back, after so long away, their children were really scared like they had been for months.

They'd been living in this fear of what had happened, and now knowing that they had to go back to school, like it's just gonna open up old wounds for them.

[01:12:48] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:48] Kyle Risi: But she says that within hours you could see things anxiety, and the fear starting to lifted in real time as like high fives and kind of hugs are being handed out.

But it's so sad to think that for months they'll all be living in this fear about going back to school. But the second they're back together, that's when. Those wounds start to heal,

[01:13:06] Adam Cox: I guess. I dunno, is it like the anxiety and the dread of going back and what it's gonna be like,

[01:13:11] Kyle Risi: oh, this is not as bad as I thought it was gonna be.

[01:13:13] Adam Cox: Yeah,

[01:13:13] Kyle Risi: so thing, and I'm with my best mate again

[01:13:15] Adam Cox: and just, yeah, maybe the kids needed their own time to recover, but like just getting the kids back together in some capacity.

[01:13:22] Kyle Risi: Yeah, that's it. Of course, this drastically affects the wider community as well, and part of that was because there was a real reluctance to talk about what had happened.

There was the sense of guilt around surviving when so many people had died. One survivor who just so happens to also be named Janet said that her parents like discouraged her from mentioning that she was a survivor and it all came from a place of compassion, right? They didn't want their child's survival to reopen somebody else's grief, so that's only gonna delay your healing.

Do you know what I mean? So people became nervous about talking openly about what they've been through. Eventually Mary Morsse, remember she was the woman passing bricks hand to hand to clear the debris. She recognised how important talking could be during the healing process, and she set up this support network where people could meet and come together to talk openly about what had happened.

She like de-stigmatized a lot of it. And just to show you how deep the scar of AB fan rand those meetings, Adam, still happen today.

[01:14:20] Adam Cox: Really?

[01:14:20] Kyle Risi: Yeah.

[01:14:21] Adam Cox: With the survivors or

[01:14:22] Kyle Risi: with the survivors and the people affected. 'cause a lot of those people will still be alive. As for Marilyn Brown, losing Janet, of course, was devastating.

She says it really helps to surround herself with pictures of Janet. And so before she leaves her house or goes to bed at night, one of the last things she does is like gently caress kind of Janet's face in one of the photographs.

[01:14:42] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:43] Kyle Risi: And Marilyn, like, I imagine every parent would often wonders what kind of woman Janet would've grown up to be like.

She thinks Janet would've obviously been incredibly strong because before the disaster, she had already survived two major operations as a baby and a young toddler. And then at 10 years old, she was sent to school and killed beneath essentially a mountain of coal.

[01:15:05] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:05] Kyle Risi: And her question was like, why did she come through all of that, only for this to happen to her when she was 10?

[01:15:10] Adam Cox: Ah, it's one of those things like, it doesn't matter really what you've been through, it's not like good luck or anything, it's just, that's just life.

[01:15:17] Kyle Risi: That's right. So Panteras school was of course, never rebuilt in its original site. Instead, Adam, it was converted into a memorial garden with a playground on one side.

So children's laughter could always be a permanent feature of the area. And the memorial itself is so well done. It's layout traces the actual school foundations, so you can actually step into them as if like you were step into one of the classrooms.

[01:15:42] Adam Cox: So it's like a series of gar uh, gardens based and they represent like different rooms.

[01:15:46] Kyle Risi: Yeah. I, I think the, the ruins of the walls are still up, so you could like navigate around and you'll be like in standard one and then standard two, and you could be in the standard that maybe your child was in.

[01:15:57] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:57] Kyle Risi: It makes it really easy for you to kind of visualise where the chalkboard would've been or where your child might have been sitting.

So it gives you that more intimate kind of experience when you're sitting within those gardens.

[01:16:08] Adam Cox: Wow.

[01:16:09] Kyle Risi: So for visitors, it's a memorial to one of the biggest disasters in British history. But to the survivors and their families, they get to go inside and be able to visualise the space that their children would've been in on a day-to basis.

Not necessarily the day obviously that this happened, but when they were young and when they were happy and carefree.

[01:16:24] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:25] Kyle Risi: It's really lovely. But Adam, that is the story of the APA fan disaster of 1966.

[01:16:32] Adam Cox: I knew the story. I didn't know just how dirty the, the company was behind it really. And also just the stories, the personal stories.

I think that was a really good way to approach it, is to try and understand, yeah, what their life was like or their daily life going about their normal day that day.

[01:16:50] Kyle Risi: How ordinary it was from the very start of the day. The, the little fights between mum and daughter. That is a small moment that Janet's mum, Marilyn will carry with her for the rest of her life.

That little bit of regret, but it's still, it's a normal thing that would've happened normally on any other day regardless.

[01:17:05] Adam Cox: Yeah. Whether this happened or not. And then I think it's just a series of bad or really unfortunate and sad events. Obviously negligence by the company, but like the fact there was fog that day so people couldn't see what was

[01:17:17] Kyle Risi: going

[01:17:18] Adam Cox: on.

Yeah.

[01:17:18] Kyle Risi: The fact that they didn't have assembly that day.

[01:17:20] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:17:21] Kyle Risi: But I did really want to tell in honour of the 60th anniversary, the story through some of the survivors. Of course there's many more, but if you wanna find out more, I definitely watch the BBC documentary, which is still on YouTube called Surviving Aberfan, where they don't really focus too much on what went wrong.

So a lot of that stuff I've had to supplement into it, just to give you an understanding of what actually happened in the story, but it really follows some of the events from the actual survivors. What like that day was like going to school, fighting with their mom and dad, going to go get their dinner money.

It's uh, it's sad.

[01:17:55] Adam Cox: And I guess a lot of the survivors, the kids, they're gonna be in their what, sixties, seventies now? Mm-hmm. Whereas I guess the parents of the kids, they might have passed by now, but you've still got the survivors of the actual event.

[01:18:07] Kyle Risi: I think Janet's mum, Marilyn, she's still around.

[01:18:09] Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:09] Kyle Risi: Yeah, she's in the documentary as well. But yeah, she's had a lifetime of obviously having to deal with their grief.

[01:18:16] Adam Cox: Yeah. As well.

[01:18:17] Kyle Risi: But yeah, I didn't really know too much about this disaster. I mean, I'm not English. I'm half Italian, half South African,

[01:18:23] Adam Cox: so you lead us to believe.

[01:18:25] Kyle Risi: Yeah. But all I knew about it was from season three of the Crown, where they briefly mentioned it, but mostly focus on the Queen.

But yeah, you fancy running the outro for this week.

[01:18:35] Adam Cox: Let's run the outro.

[01:18:37] Kyle Risi: And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did,

[01:18:44] Adam Cox: and if today's episode has sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favour and follow us on your favourite podcast app.

It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show.

[01:18:55] Kyle Risi: And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget the next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon. And as always, it is completely free to access.

[01:19:03] Adam Cox: And if you want even more, then you can join our certified Freaks tier to unlock the entire archive.

You get to delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek of what's coming next.

[01:19:13] Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday and until then, remember, statistics count the dead, but the stories restore their lives. We'll see you next time.

[01:19:22] Adam Cox: See ya.