60 years after Aberfan, landslide victims still can’t return home

Deb Luxon

“I never thought my daughter would hear the same sound the Aberfan children heard that day,” said Tina Honeyfield, standing in her gutted Cwmtyleri living room.

While this week marks 60 years since a coal tip landslide claimed the lives of 116 schoolchildren and 28 adults in Aberfan, the disaster lives on not just in public memory, but through the very real risk of landslides in south Wales.

Some families know that risk all too well. On 24 November 2024, the Cwmtyleri coal tip in Blaenau Gwent slipped following heavy rain during Storm Bert, and one family is still not back in their home almost two years on.

Tina and her partner Ralph Connor didn’t know a coal tip towered over their home until it was knocking on their door. That night, Tina went to check the drain outside the front door and found she couldn’t close the door again – “sludge” was pouring in.

The 51-year-old said: “We’d not seen rainfall like that before. I didn’t recognise the street anymore. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. There was a river of mud up to our windows, and a huge tree had come down.

“Then our daughter came downstairs saying she’d heard something ‘like a low flying jet’, a really big rumbling.

“Reading the reports from the Aberfan disaster, that’s exactly what people said, it sounded like a ‘low flying jet’.”

Moments before, Tina had been going through old family photos on their living room floor. The family moved everything valuable upstairs and were evacuated, leaving behind their beloved cat.

Coal tips are piles of rock and low-grade coal cleared from mines and typically dumped nearby.

There are almost 2,600 monitored coal tips in Wales, with 368 deemed high risk – almost all of them in south Wales.

In 2020, a landslide at Tylorstown in Rhondda Cynon Taf displaced 60,000 tonnes of spoil during Storm Dennis. That event prompted the Welsh Government to map and categorise coal tips for the first time.

The Cwmtyleri tip was already designated category D, the highest inspection category, indicating a potential to affect public safety. Despite regular inspections, 40 households had to be evacuated that night.

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A Blaenau Gwent Council spokesperson said: “The tip is inspected at six-monthly intervals which is the established inspection frequency for Category D tips, and prior to named storm events or weather warnings. The cause of the slip was directly related to the intense rainfall during Storm Bert, which caused a breakout of water in the hillside immediately above the tip. This saturated the material resulting in the slip.

“Prior to this incident, there was no evidence of any water issues within the slip area of the tip and this was a one-off unpredictable event directly related to the storm. Together with the Mining Remediation Authority, we continue to monitor the tip closely, and even more frequently before and during forecasted significant weather events.”

Almost two years after the Cwmtyleri landslide, the couple and their two children have not been able to return to their home of 19 years. Repairs have been delayed by contamination checks and the wait for an insurance payout.

Throughout this time, Tina and Ralph have continued working as directors of local community organisation Pentref Tyleri.

Between 2020 and 2025, the Welsh and UK governments spent £220m on coal tip remediation, acknowledging that climate change is increasing the likelihood of landslides through heavier rainfall and storms.

‘Wake-up call’

Cabinet Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability Llyr Gruffydd described the Tylorstown landslide as a “wake-up call” and urged “vigilance” in the face of climate change.

He said: “We know the industrial legacy that we have across Wales in terms of disused tips. But we also know that whilst we presume that the tips have been stable for many years, climate change is introducing a new challenge.

“We have longer periods of heavy rainfall, drought and dry weather, which have a destabilising effect on what might have been safer tips in the past.

“That’s why this programme of monitoring, maintenance and management is being put in place and it’s exactly why the Disused Tips Authority is coming into being. The new authority will be charged directly with oversight of this to give us confidence that where we need to act, that absolutely happens to make sure that those communities living nearby aren’t put at any risk.”

Repairs

For Ralph and Tina, however, that does not give them back their home. Repairs, including damp treatment and replacement flooring, are estimated to cost more than £51,000. That does not include the new furniture and appliances they need.

Ralph said: “Luckily it was just the edge of the tip that came down. If more had come down, we wouldn’t be speaking with you today. After Aberfan, you would have expected all tips to be dealt with so that could never happen again, but it hasn’t.

“In the past these were once in a lifetime weather events, but Storm Dennis and Storm Bert only four years apart … a visible result of changing climate.

“If nothing is done about climate change, communities like this – the poorest communities – are always going to be the ones that suffer the most. We are going to have more devastating floods and more landslides if people and governments don’t start thinking in a long-term way.”

Remediation work

After the 2024 landslide, Blaenau Gwent Council secured £1.3m for remediation work at Cwmtyleri, installing new drainage systems to prevent the tip becoming waterlogged. A further £3m will be spent over the next two years on reprofiling and landscaping.

Elsewhere in the Valleys, coal tips have been transformed into nature reserves, recreational areas or artworks, such as Sultan the Pit Pony, made from coal shale on the site of Penallta Colliery near Caerphilly.

The question remains whether Cwmtyleri tip will remain a reminder of a terrible day or be reclaimed as something entirely new.

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