0:00 The file is brittle.0:01 The ink, faded.0:03 It’s a memorandum, dated 1939, titled “The Sliding of Colliery Rubbish Tips.” It is full of common-sense warnings.0:13 A guide to prevent disaster.0:16 The official report, written decades later, would note that this document… was put into a drawer and forgotten.0:27 Last week, we spoke of a locked door and a missing key.0:32 Here, the crime is not a missing object, but a warning that was deliberately ignored.0:40 A key that was never turned.0:42 For years, the village of Aberfan, in Wales, lived below seven of these tips.0:49 Mountains of industrial waste, piled high from the local colliery, all managed by the National Coal Board — the N.C.B.1:01 They were a known hazard.1:03 The archive contains a record of a slide at Cilfynydd in 1939, the very event that prompted the forgotten memorandum.1:14 Then, in 1944, a major slide occurred right there, in Aberfan.1:20 It traveled five hundred meters.1:23 The tribunal later called it a “clear warning.” It left a visible scar on the hillside that was still there in 1966, for ALL to see.1:35 The warnings grew more specific.1:38 An engineer’s letter, dated 1963, warns of danger after heavy rain.1:44 Residents report small movements in the tips, ground shifts after storms.1:51 All of it is disregarded by the N.C.B.1:55 The Pantglas Junior School sat directly beneath the most recent spoil heap, Tip Number Seven.2:04 A school full of children, sitting at the bottom of a mountain of wet, unstable coal waste.2:12 The records are clear.2:14 The N.C.B.2:15 knew about the underground springs that were lubricating the base of the tip.2:22 They knew about the previous slides.2:26 And they did… nothing.2:28 October twenty-first, 1966.2:30 It had been raining for days.2:33 At nine-fifteen in the morning, the children of Pantglas Junior School had just returned to their classrooms from the morning assembly.2:46 That is when Tip Number Seven gave way.2:49 One hundred fifty thousand cubic meters of slurry.2:54 A black wave of coal waste and mud, moving at over eighty miles an hour.3:01 It engulfed the school.3:03 It destroyed eighteen houses.3:06 It was over in minutes.3:08 The sound, witnesses said, was like a low-flying jet… followed by an absolute, crushing silence.3:17 Miners, parents, and teachers clawed at the sludge with their bare hands, desperate to reach the children buried below.3:28 One hundred forty-four people were killed.3:32 One hundred sixteen of them were children, most between the ages of seven and ten.3:40 An official inquiry, the Aberfan Tribunal, sat for seventy-six days.3:46 Its conclusion was unequivocal.3:49 I will quote from the final report: “Blame for the disaster rests upon the National Coal Board.” It named nine specific N.C.B.4:01 officials as responsible.4:03 The evidence was so damning that the N.C.B.'s own counsel asked the tribunal to ignore the testimony of their chairman.4:14 And yet… the N.C.B.4:16 denied liability throughout the entire inquiry.4:20 No one was dismissed.4:22 No one was demoted.4:24 No criminal charges were ever filed.4:27 The verdict was delivered, and then, just like that first memorandum from 1939, it was filed away.4:37 The community, left to its grief, started its own conferences, calling them “The Way Ahead.” They had to find their own path, because the institution responsible offered none.4:53 The crime, buried in this archive, is not just the negligence that led to the slide.5:01 It is the institutional silence that followed.5:05 A system that found blame, but refused to deliver justice, leaving only a scar on a hill and a village haunted by the ghosts of its children.
