Wales, Fearing Another Aberfan Disaster, Angered By Westminster's Inaction On 100s Of Coal Waste Piles

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Edmund Richards, who worked for 40 years as a miner, shakes his head sadly as he gazes at one of the many disused coal tips at the head of the Rhondda Fawr valley in south Wales. “They’re on the move,” he says. “No doubt. From time to time, inspectors will come and have a look, and say all is fine, but everyone around here knows they are on the move, on the slide.” It isn’t always easy to spot the tips in this craggy landscape decades after most of the mines closed. Often, they are cloaked in scrub and trees but Richards, 80, says everyone who lives nearby knows where they are and is worried about them. “They need to get on and sort them out once and for all,” adds Richards. “It’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens.”

The issue of what to do about Wales’s 2,500 disused coal tips is back on the political agenda after the Labour-led Welsh government published maps pinpointing 350 situated close to homes and communities that it fears could put people at risk in the event of a landslip. Of those more hazardous ones, 79 are in Rhondda Cynon Taf, 59 in Merthyr Tydfil, and 51 in Caerphilly, all areas of south Wales where the impact of an industry that fired the Industrial Revolution are still clearly seen and felt.

It was a mammoth task to identify, record and categorise all the tips on a central database for the first time but an even tougher job seems to be persuading the UK government to help pay for the inspections and, ultimately, make them safe. Westminster insists coal-tip safety is a devolved matter and so it is up to the Welsh administration to fund any work that is needed.

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Residents of Rhondda appear to agree. Anthony Thomas, a retired civil servant whose home is close to one of the high-risk tips, said: “Mining benefited the whole of Britain. There was no such thing as a Welsh government back then, so the cost of putting things right should be shared.” As a boy growing up in the village of Trehafod, Andrew Hedditch remembers playing on a tip that subsequently slipped. And everyone else here is haunted by the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a tip collapsed on to the village school. “A lot of people made a lot of money from Wales,” said Hedditch. “The UK government definitely should help.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/26/wales-fears-another-aberfan-as-westminster-refuses-to-clean-up-tips

[Rhiannon12866]

1. When I was last in Wales, a couple of decades ago, there were demonstrations for independence.