“A Silence in which You Couldn’t Hear a Child”

2009-10-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

On October 21, 1966, children in the small Welsh village of Aberfan were engaged in their school lessons at Pantglas Junior School. Above on Merthyr Mountain, a movement started that many described as sounding like a jet plane overhead. Harold Rees, a senior school student on his way to class described it as a big wave of muck higher than a house, containing boulders, trees, trams, and bricks that “was moving fast, as fast as a car goes downtown rumbling like an old train.”

Moisture from rain and an underground spring had saturated a pile of coal waste from the Merthyr Vale shaft, liquefying the bottom. In moments this land-slide of slag leveled a school wall, filling the classrooms. Harold Rees watched the sludge swallow two of his classmates sitting on a stone wall outside, plunge across the street, and knock down eighteen houses. The barber, Mr. George, was saved by a piece of corrugated sheeting. He later recalled that after the hideous rumble, there was silence in which you “couldn’t hear a bird or a child.”

Minutes after the slag enveloped the school, a road repair crew and the miners rushed to the scene. Men from the local pubs, senior school children, and mothers joined them until hundreds plunged their hands and shovels into the coal waste to rescue the children. None were recovered alive. The workers passed their corpses from person to person, laying them beyond the debris and dross. A total of 144 died, 116 of them children.

Just over a month from the 40 year anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster, concerned grandfather Ed Wiley arrived in Washington D.C. with a flag printed with the words: “Every child deserves a safe and healthy school in their community.” He had walked 455 from Charleston, West Virginia to raise awareness of the Marsh Fork Elementary school children who learn their lessons under the shadow of a coal sludge lagoon.

In the Aberfan graveyard, two rows of white arches mark the graves of children ages 7-10; this small coal mining town in the Valleys of South Wales lost an entire generation. In Sundial, West Virginia, the Massey Energy sludge impoundment holds back 2.8 billion gallons of coal slurry containing heavy metals such as mercury, chromium, cadmium, boron, selenium, and nickel with a leaking earthen dam. If the dam were breached, experts have estimated that the Marsh Fork elementary would have 3 minutes to evacuate. Massey responded to this finding by installing a blow horn.

Two hundred and fifty children attend Marsh Fork, and already many miss school for problems with asthma and stomachaches that are a likely result of the slurry pond and the Goal’s Coal Plant silo nearby. Efforts of local citizens and environmental groups to garner legislative support on the state and national level to build a new school have been disregarded. Their concerns are not unwarranted. Since 1972, three major sludge spills have occurred in Appalachia, causing 125 deaths and massive environmental damage.

Today in memory of the Aberfan junior school children, donate to Pennies of Promise , a grass roots fundraising campaign to build the Marsh Fork Elementary School children a new building in a safe environment.

Coal In Our Veins: A Personal Journey

“A Silence in which You Couldn’t Hear a Child”