‘Every day we fear being the next Aberfan’: Dangerous coal tips loom over Welsh towns

“When a coal tip collapses, there is no roar of warning, no shouts or panic. There is simply a rushing sound and then silence,” says Suzie Rees, 66, pausing to glance up at the coal tips that line the landscape of her home in South Wales. “Something of that magnitude doesn’t ever leave the consciousness.” For Rees, any mention of the Aberfan tragedy brings up a shiver of terror. On Oct 21, 1966, heavy rain caused 150,000 tons of coal waste to slide down a hillside in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales and engulf a junior school and nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. She is speaking the day after the 60th anniversary of the disaster last week. Just 12 miles away, the King visited the site where the Pantglas Primary school was crushed by tons of deadly slurry. He described it as “the saddest and most tragic of days imaginable”. Rees was six years old, at a primary school nearby, when the accident took place. “My grandfather was a coal miner,” she says. “I remember, after Aberfan, I spent every day panicking to myself quietly that the coal was going to come and take my school too.” Today, Rees runs a tour service in Caerphilly. This town, and the surrounding communities in South Wales, live in constant fear of another coal tip collapsing, especially when it rains heavily. There are 2,589 disused coal tips in Wales and most are found in the principality’s south. Of those, 368 tips are assessed as having a potential to impact public safety and 85 are classed as Category D tips, posing the highest risk and requiring inspection twice a year. After Aberfan, the UK Government introduced the Mines and Quarries Tip Act 1969 to improve tip safety, but a 2022 report commissioned by the Welsh Government found the legislation did “not effectively address the management of disused coal tips”. The Disused Tips and Quarries (Wales) Act 2025 introduced a new regime for tip management, but many communities are still dissatisfied with the tip regulation and want to see them gone. “I think there’s a huge sense of anger here, particularly for people in South Wales,” Rees says. “The tips have made so much of our landscape and all of that wealth was taken out.” Following the Aberfan disaster, the National Coal Board and its chairman, Lord Robens, infamously evaded taking responsibility for the coal slip, provoking massive anger and upset. Today, communities across South Wales feel their local authorities are still refusing to grasp the safety risks the tips pose to the public . Deputy First Minister Huw Irranca-Davies said in 2025 it was “difficult” to give a “cast iron guarantee” that people are safe from another coal tip disaster. “I think we’ve sort of come to accept that’s how it is here, that nothing will ever be properly done about the tips, and actually we shouldn’t because it’s wrong,” Rees says. “It is terrifying.” In November 2024 the unthinkable became a reality for the residents of Cwmtillery, a tiny village in South Wales. A former category D coal tip above Woodland terrace partly collapsed, sending around 350 tons of slurry into people’s houses. Two years on, Tina Honeyfield, her partner Ralph Connor, and their two children, are still living in temporary accommodation. They face a bill of more than £51,000 in repairs. “We were in the house when the tip collapsed and it filled up with water so quickly,” she says. “We saw that the street was just covered in this kind of thick black slurry.” “Looking back over those two years and processing everything, it is a lot,” she says. “And now with our rapidly changing climate , you can never feel a hundred per cent safe around the tips.” Down the street from Honeyfield, Wayne Green, 51, can see the disused coal tip from his window. His wife still suffers sleepless nights from the slip in 2024. “Every time there is a thunderstorm we are scared,” he says. “The authorities have done some good work stabilising the tip but the meetings have now fizzled out and the residents are still on edge.” Honeyfield agrees. “Since the incident in 2024 people have been afraid,” she says. “They are afraid that something unforeseen could happen again because that was unforeseen.” Green claims the Cwmtillery community was not told that the tip became classified as a Category D in 2020 until after the slip in 2024. “No one knew we were living below a potential death trap,” Green says, pointing up at the trees which mask the black tip. “What really annoys the residents here is that nobody told us anything, I had no idea it was a category D. My kids played up there. Imagine what could have happened.” Honeyfield set up a community group called Pentref Tyleri (Tyleri Village) which hosts events in the church hall. “Aberfan will always come up in people’s memories,” Honeyfield says. “The hub became a sort-of support centre, a place to connect with people and talk about the experience.” “It’s always going to be communities like ours, the poorest communities, that pay the price of industry.” Over 25 miles across the valleys, Robert Bevan, a Labour councillor for Tylorstown and Ynyshir, can also see a perilous coal tip from his kitchen window. The tip on the Llanwonno hillside above the village of Tylorstown in Rhondda Cynon partly collapsed during Storm Denis on Feb 16, 2020 and sent 60,000 tons of waste gushing into the river. Nobody was hurt but residents are still demanding answers. “There will always be that level of concern because of the impact of Aberfan, 60 years on it is still raw,” says Bevan. “The work that has been done is absolutely first class, but with the scale of the mining in south Wales , we have a large number of tips that need tackling.” He says it is reassuring that the Government has recognised the coal tips need to be tackled. “I think you will always keep one eye on the tip,” he says. “It is inspected regularly and that gives you some reassurance. But at the end of the day, nature being nature, who can predict what is going to happen?” For Gillian Challagh, 70, and Anthony France, 76, the tip is one of the reasons why it is time to leave Tylorstown. “We are moving away, let’s put it that way,” says Challagh, who has lived across from the collapsed tip for 16 years. “We are not told anything about the tip and I would like to know what is going on, just so my mind can be put at rest. “The slurry can’t reach us if it happens again, but we don’t have any communication on what is going on with the work up there,” she adds. “Aberfan is always in the back of my mind.” Stuart Adams, 66, has lived in South Wales his whole life and has walked “hundreds of miles” over the coal tips during his time. He joined the Clear South Wales’s Coal Tips, a group which campaigns to clear and get rid of the coal tips, because he sees first-hand the movement on the tips. “I walk on them all the time. I can see the changes in the ground, where fissures open up, so there is movement,” says Adams, a former police officer. “The views from them are beautiful, so they are a juxtaposition in some way. They powered the empire but they are dangerous.” In 2021, the Welsh Government provisionally estimated it would cost around £600m to remediate the disused coal tips in the south Wales valleys over a 10-to-15-year period. Thus far, the national and Welsh governments have pledged around £230 million. Yet when companies propose to remove coal from the tips, other issues arise. A project has been proposed by a private mining company in the hopes to extract around 500,000 tonnes of coal from two high-risk tips at the former Bedwas Colliery in Caerphilly. It was reported the money from the sales of the coal would be used to restore those tips later. While some residents want to see the coal being removed, the scheme has triggered intense backlash over environmental concerns . The spoil would be processed in Sirhowy Valley Country Park and there are fears this will detrimentally affect the nearby population and wildlife. Janine Reed, an independent councillor for Ynysddu, Caerphilly, believes the private company is planning to “mine through the back door” in effort to make money from this proposal. “They are using the Aberfan disaster in their presentation to the community as some sort of justification for their project,” she says. “They would be dumping millions of contaminated spoil and transporting it through a country park to process it.” The residents of South Wales will wait to see what happens with the tips in the long-term. For now, they are sticking together. Back in Caerphilly, Rees gazes at the town’s handsome castle, which has stood through more than 700 years of wars, plagues and unimaginable social change. As she looks up at its walls, thinking about her next tour, she points out the coal tips that loom menacingly in the background. “The people of the valleys are the people of the valleys,” she says. “We support each other through everything.” “But our communities still live in fear. It’s still happening. It’s not just in the past.”