Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 11: The Aberfan Disaster

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Today @aliceavizandum, @oldmananders0n, and @donoteat1 are joined by @TalentedVoter from the Antifada to talk about mining, the Aberfan disaster, the pitfalls of nationalization under Keynesian capitalism, and also the iggles. Slides here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dq7BFmUWIk listen to trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ Here's the Patreon link so you can watch the Groverhaus episode: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

Alright, I'm going to start. Welcome to another episode of Well, There's Your Problem, which is a podcast about engineering disasters. I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are he, him. Right. Yes. I'm Alice Cordwell Kelly. My pronouns are she and her. I'm the person who's talking now. Justin, you really picked a great one here. A lot of great dead children content for our comedy podcast. Our guests picked this one. I take no credit. You're insulting me for not having the foresight to pick a disaster with lots of dead children. Bo Paul is going to be a fucking riot. I am Liam Anderson. I am at. Go back, go back. I am at old man Anderson on Twitter. My pronouns are he, him.

Hi, clown car. Hi, I'm my guest. I'm Sean KB from the Antifada podcast. My pronouns are he, him. And if you don't like pronouns, uh, student, then die mad hose. It's all I got to say. That's mad. That's pretty much it. To be fair, the about of dumb pronouns commentary in the YouTube comments has gone way down. So I appreciate those of you for dogpiling on morons. Yes. We have some, we already have some Antifa super soldiers in the chat and that's, you know, we always appreciate that. We, I think we let, we sent some to you on loan, right? Antifada. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's just like 50 guys in black hoodies just in the comment section, just hanging out smoking club cigarettes and just getting beat down. Yeah.

So, um, what you're seeing here on the screen, you might notice there's a whole bunch of, uh, you know, gray crap here. And then there's a town, uh, that, that gray. Wait a damn second. Did you skip the, the, the one slide? No, no, no, no, I did not. Oh, fuck. He fucked up because he skipped a head to it. And then he went back. Oh my bad. All right. Yeah. Let's talk about the dead kids. Yeah. So damn, it was pretty, pretty good. It's pretty fucked up that they just built their town around that giant like pile of shit. No, as it turns out, this pile of shit is not supposed to be there. All right. All right. Yeah. So this is the Aberfan disaster. Aberfan is the village.

Aberfan. Aberfan. Look, this is where, this is where I get to mispronounce things, but they're not French. They're Welsh. That's true. And it's not racist because Welsh people are white mostly. And also Welsh isn't even a real language. So you can mispronounce it all over your mic. I'm a, I'm a POC, a person of Kenwood. So it's POC, but somehow it's spelled with like seven consonants in a row. There's like six Ys in there. Yeah. All right. But I thought before we begin, we'd talk about a real engineering disaster or disaster in general. And that was the reffing at last night's Eagles game. Yeah. Let's fucking go. All right. So the hero in the Eagles uniform being squashed by the

menaced Gideon Clowney. How is that not targeting? How is that not targeting? I bet if you let me get there, I can explain this. So the, the NFL's official explanation was Carson Wentz wasn't giving himself up despite clearly having given himself up. And therefore it was not targeting despite the fact that Gideon Clowney led with the helmet, which are absolutely not supposed to fucking do anymore. And the league kind of was just like, Oh, well, our bad, despite the fact that there were seven fucking refs around the guy, all of whom should have immediately thrown a flag. Gideon Clowney should have been ejected. He's done this shit before. He had a fucking dirty hit on Nick Foles last season when he was quarterbacking that he got

fined $40,000 for. And it's inexplicable that the fucking league can say with a straight face, yes, we, we care about player safety when this hit knocked Carson Wentz out of the game and gave him a concussion. Like it's, it's absolutely ridiculous that the Seahawks are still allowed to even fucking play in the NFL. All the fucking team should be contracted. Paul Allen, or the course of Paul Allen should be dug up and shot into the fucking son. I fucking hate Pete Carroll. Pete Carroll is a 9 11 truther, but only for the Pentagon, the coast of the Seahawks. The guys are absolutely fucking possible combination to go with. He sucked at USD. He won one Super Bowl and then blew up the defense because he was too busy trying to glory boy fucking Russell

Wilson of all people like Marshawn Lynch, give the ball to Marshawn Lynch. And then he's like, actually, my brain genius says that we should have thrown the ball against a fucking leaky Patriots defense. And that's why they didn't win a Super Bowl. And that's why they won't fucking win a Super Bowl this year. Genevieve Clowney is a dirty fucking player. He has been for years. Fucking get him out of the league, get the whole Seahawks team out of the league. Fuck him. Go birds. Yeah, just just sink Seattle into the ocean. Fuck Seattle. Fuck Amazon. Fuck Jeff Bay. Fuck Jeff Bezos. Oh, we got all the Washington Post. Yeah, I mean, yes. Yeah, really, Washington. I'm not an Eagles fan. I'm actually a Giants fan. I didn't watch this game. But it sounds like to me

that Clowney should have been the name of the ref. Am I right? Oh, like the damn clowns in Congress. I would like it to be known, Sean, that I was at Eagles Giants Week 17. And it was delightful to watch your kin folks slowly lose their fucking minds, including the guy like at least 50 years old in a fucking Lawrence Taylor jersey talking about how he was mad at us for cheering because he was trying to defend the Giants pride, like right in front of his like six year old child. And then he fell down the stairs as he was fucking leaving. Because due because the New York Giants are just the never Trump Republicans in the NFL and they can all be fired into the fucking son pale. We're going to have to bring on from this series how I met Lawrence Taylor when he was

still playing for the Giants and Liam is basically destroying my childhood as we speak. Would you like to know about his many, many domestic abuse charges? This is future, future Patreon episode is just the disaster is the NFL. And we just let Liam have the mic for an hour. Yeah. Well, we have to talk about another three letter acronym that starts with N, though, which is the NCB. But wait a second. That sounds like it's national something and we're moisturized leftists. That's true. If you felt my face right now, you would know that it's not been moisturized.

I my skin is fucking gross, dude. Do some fucking skincare, Jesus. No, no, it's Liam just spent the last three days working up to this episode by doing the skin care regimen of a coal miner. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just in full town road. Curiously. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, I am a good person sometimes. All right. So let's talk a bit about coal mining in Britain, right? All right. So historically, there's been a lot of it, right? Because, you know, that whole industrial evolution thing happened there. Yeah, you needed to put in the trains and things of that nature. And also heating your house and like power plants. Yeah, generating electricity. Steel. Not to mention if you're Britain, putting that coal into

steamships and going around and conquering and brutalizing the entire world. Absolutely. And just sold a lot of it to Santa. Yeah. Just generally just piling it up in big heaps and setting it on fire for no reason. That was like the number one entertainment activity until like 1970 in Britain. That was the NFL. Settling shit on fire and burning it. Yeah. Like good referee. I got it. Back in. Yeah. Less chance of concussion. Yeah. So now somehow having many coal companies all producing the same product fucked up, right? And so in 1946, the National Coal Board was created, right? And this was a wave of nationalization from the first labor government post war. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A whole bunch of stuff was nationalized

amongst which was the coal industry, right? So we're we have a really progressive forward thinking attitude towards coal. Coal is no longer mined for profit. Coal is mined for the people, right? And so in the early days of the NCB, there's like a massive investment in mining infrastructure. British coal becomes the cheapest in Europe because they've increased labor productivity so much. But then in general, technology started moving towards maybe we should use oil instead of coal, you know, for things like powering trains or things like what's it? Eating your house. Yeah. Well, there's a couple of advantages. You don't because it's liquid, you don't have to shovel stuff.

Yeah. How does it throw your back out? Yeah, you just get it with a really big straw. And of being in the hills of in the mountains of a place like Wales, which is nice and peaceful, if you use oil, you can go to adventurous places like Iran and Iraq. That's true around much more interesting. Oh, this is true. Yes. You can have all kinds of interesting adventures. Yes, you can have follies follies. Yeah. So you know, with with the increased labor productivity that came with modernization of the coal mines with also reduced demand, that meant there were a bunch of layoffs. And that was from the late fifties, the early seventies, which is when we're going to be talking about.

And you know, this was not popular with the National Union of Mine Workers, which was their really big labor union, right? Yeah, really, really strong one, too. Like it was it was a well unionized industry. And the the NUM was particularly militant, too, like they wanted to go on strike. Oh, yeah. But they didn't really go on strike until 1969. That was like a wildcat strike. And then in the seventies, that's when the really big strikes happened. But that's after what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And in the sixties, they had a couple of like undeclared strikes that they sort of rattled the saber and the NCB would like give them everything they wanted. But yeah, no, it became much more adversarial

pretty much after what we're going to talk about. Let's just say for the sake of this episode, because there's no Arthur Skagal. There's no minor strike of the eighties. There's no Thatcher involved in this. Let's just say National Union of Miners, Kings, heroes, yes, heroes of the story. There's a little bit of Thatcher involved in this. Yeah, she's like she she haunts the like tail end of this bit. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, you know, eventually, there was like the thing in the eighties when Thatcher broke the union. She closed the mines. Everyone was very mad because this is like a widely regarded as a bad move. Unless you were a Tory, right? Yeah, we don't mine a lot of coal anymore. That was

probably inevitable. But the state of a lot of former coal mining communities can be laid firmly at her door. So that's that's why her grave is like a gender neutral bathroom. Well, listen, if if Thatcher hadn't done that, I would have ended up like the United States were our coal communities are strong and vibrant. But if if only coding had been invented, then all of our miners could have learned to code in the 16 nothing bad would have happened. Yeah. They could have learned how to like punch punch cards. What's cobalt, but for coal? So when our story takes place in the 1960s, the NCB is run by a guy named Alfred Robbins,

Baron Robbins of Waldingham. You know, he's he's part of that socialist title and ability pipeline that only exists in the United Kingdom, right? Yeah. And it's what there was one of the weird features of the athlete government was that like you would get these kind of not to put you find a point on but cronies not necessarily in a bad way. But like Alfred Robbins came up as a trade unionist and he was an MP. And then essentially they like decided, hey, to keep you out of politics, do you want to be in charge of national coal? And you'll never have to fight an election again, because we'll just make you a lord. Yeah, it's very, very weird. I like it. But also I hate it because I'm an American. Yeah, literally, like we created kind

of a labor aristocracy. One of the things he did was the I think the first thing he did is head of the National Coal Board was get a private plane and a limo with the the license plate NCB1. Jesus fuck. Nice. Yeah, that's obvious about it. You know, you have that you have that Lord system there, which obviously, you know, very long lineage. In the United States, we have similar signatures and they go to career bureaucrats, wonderful people like Elliot Abrams, for example, who's never been out of government bureaucracy or, you know, the think tank apparatus for all these. But at least you don't have to call him like your majesty or something. His dick would get so hard it would

explode the rest of his body. Also, I just want to take a quick break. There will be a Donald Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey this month. So expect that bonus content for we get beat up at a Trump rally in Wildwood in January. I don't want to get beat up. Oh, you're going. You're going. Don't worry, guys. We'll send troops. Thanks, bud. Back operators. All right. So let's talk about the mine in Aberfan, which is actually the what is it? The Murther Vale. Murther Vale. It's just Murther, yeah. Okay. It's named that that whole region is Murther, the town down the road is Murther Tidville, which is the like most miserable place I've ever been. Just dismal. You think it looks bad there. 30 years of deindustrialization have

not been kind. The wiki page is giving me. Oh, yeah. It's like castle. You look at a picture of Murther Tidville like an ordinary street scene. You just start kind of like itching. Yeah. So this is this is a shaft mine, right? So, you know, you go down the hole, you dig some tunnels, right? You send the coal back up and you come back out of the hole at the end of the day, you know? Yeah. And you have the stylish like pit heads there. So, oh, yeah. You know, you have like a nice towel with a big wheel going around that's very aesthetic. Yes. And this is, of course, opposed to like a big open pit mine, right? Like those one, those big German ones, although those don't actually exist because the Germans only use renewable

energy as we know. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. A true thing that I believe. Yes. Where did these giant holes come from? Well, that would be exploded ordinance of that. Nope. That's what they want you to think. Just one of the late war Allied plans just to drop a bomb so big that even when it doesn't detonate, it just buries itself and creates a lake. The thing about mining in real life is that it's not like minecraft, right? Oh, she's not? Yeah. No, you can't you can't like just store all the cobblestone in chests, right? You got to put it in big piles outside, right? Right. This is what you call. Oh, this one steals it. Good. You don't want this stuff. Oh, love it. Yeah. So, yeah, mining produces overburden or spoil,

and that's all the stuff that isn't the coal or ore you're digging for, right? The dirt. Yes, the dirt, right? And so this is stored in something called a spoil tip, right? And the spoil tip, again, is just a big pile on spoil or overburden. It's different from tailings. Tailings are a different thing we'll get to in a minute, but tailings are the waste left over after processing of, you know, your coal or your ore. That's usually really nasty and highly toxic, right? It's not just dirt. And there's a lot of that that needs to get stored, too. Yeah. So mining doesn't sound very like good for the environment. Like I think it turns out, yeah. Resource extraction is pretty nasty in pretty much all industries, yeah.

Well, we just got to get Elon Musk to like mine out of asteroids and then it'll be fine. I heard of it. It's just fucking depressing. I heard of this great, this asteroid he had his eyes on called what is it like? Grimes. 3674 Bolivia. There was a coup there. All right. So anyway, evo Morales is the correct and rightful president of Bolivia. Anyway, so these big piles, these spoil tips are usually pretty stable, right? Because they're just, you know, a heap of racks, right? Sure. But they can be affected by soil conditions, water content, so on and so forth, right? Just put a tarp over it. It's fine. That's what big, big, big tarp. I mean, that's,

that that's that is a solution, actually, like that is something you can do. I hate when I'm like, come up with a dumb joke and it's an actual like, no, actually, that's something is worse and less funny. Yeah. Am I the only person on this podcast who's actually worked with spoil before? I think so, yeah. Okay, because I yeah, I work in heavy union construction of people don't know. And when we are excavating and when we are drilling for deep foundation work, we got spoil all over the place, man. I feel like I'm back at home here for this podcast is very, very exciting. Although because I work in New York City, and absolutely everything is fucking polluted, spoils not just something that ruins the

landscape, it's also something that will basically give you cancer within like two, three years. So yeah, everything's polluted. Everything's bad. I don't know about these, these spoils look nice and pristine and non carcinogenic, though. So maybe nobody will die on this episode. Yeah, I mean, I think the the actual like, ground in Wales is fine because like, there's not big cities or anything that all of these mining towns like 5000 people at most, and all they do was like, all they did anyway, like mine coal. So it's not like there's a lot of other stuff going into it. So unlike Brooklyn and Queens, that inches dump like 150 years of PCB and oils and other chemicals into the story. Yeah, I don't hear it, but okay. Yeah.

Cowards. I provide my hazmat suit just for this episode, but I guess I'll take it. Yeah, if the mic quality is bad, it's because it's inside the like Tyvek hazmat suit. So we got to talk about the Mertha Vale Collarys spoil tip number seven, right? Such a romantic location. I know, right? I just realized I don't know which of these it is. I think it's sort of this in the middle here. The one that was ominous, baby. The ominous one. God damn it. As of 1966, when our story begins, spoil tip seven was the only one in use, right? Because they filled the other six, right? Like, it's just a big pile of dirt. And

after a certain point, somebody's like, a pile of dirt's getting pretty big. We should do another one. Yes. Yeah, what's the criteria for like changing tips? They're just like, I think this one's good. I think that's basically going to be it. There's going to be a guy from the mine who just kind of like looks at it and goes, Yeah, it's looking a little big. We should probably start another one. The tip inspector. Yeah. Just the telling. Yeah, you want anything else expected, that's got to go to another union. Yeah, the international brotherhood of tip inspection. Unionized as mine workers and sex workers. Real crazy parties. Nice. So yeah, so this was on the western slope of the valley where Aberfan was located just above the village. You can see the

village down here. If you can see my mouse going. Also, I apologize for my activate windows thing down here. I'm sure someone's going to point that out. I do have a legal copy of windows. I just can't show you how to get it on my new computer. So to be clear, between the village on the left and the giant like spoil tip on the right, that's that's downhill towards the village. Yes. Yes, it is. I see no problems. No, there's nothing wrong here. So this spoil tip in particular was composed of both spoil and tailings from chemical extraction of the coal, right? So it's got the nasty stuff in there too. It was 111 feet high and had 297,000 cubic yards of spoil. It was sited on top of a spring. Oh, good. Nice. Yeah. That just means that you get some like

charcoal filtered spring water outside. Yeah, it's good enough for JT, it's good enough for the rest of us. If you put it by the patch of mint, you get menfall too. It's great. Bad joke cycle. This is the bad jokes podcast. You're fine. Oh, perfect. Great. Thanks. I'm ready. So in 1963, May of 1963, Tip 7 shifted a fair amount, right? Then there was a major slide in November of that year, right? And the National Coal Board said, oh, that's just a tailings run, right? That's because, you know, we put too much tailings on that day and they slid off the side of the hill. It's fine, right? So, gross, but like, safe. Yes. So they stopped dumping tailings after that on spoil tip 7, but they kept dumping spoil, right? So it's still getting big.

For productivity, the more spoiling and the bigger it is, the more the more the NBC is doing well. I'm sure that's true. Yeah. I mean, it's a hell of a lot easier to like look at the big fucking pile of spoil and be like, yeah, that's a lot than it is to like count. Doing so good, guys. Yeah. So there had been some long time complaints from the residents of Aberfan that, you know, they were building this big spoil tip, which was located directly above, you know, the elementary school. And they were... Yeah. I'm sure the NCB handled this very sensitively and wasn't like, fuck you, move the school. Well, they didn't even say to move the school. They just sort of ignored them, right?

Left on red. Yeah. Oh, that's a hard way to go. So, I mean, from 1963 onwards, they were complaining about this, and I believe there was at some point some agreement that the NCB was going to handle some drainage issues with the spoil tip, but I don't recall exactly when that was. I think it was shortly before. Yeah. But they had to like run off because it was getting into the water table. And so like the bottom of the valley where Aberfan was would flood, and people complained to the coal board that like, hey, not only are our houses flooding, but like this water's pitch black and it leaves this kind of greasy residue when it comes down. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. And the NCB said, okay,

yeah, yeah, we'll do something about that maybe. We'll dig like a trench. You have to imagine who we're dealing with here, right? It's 1966. You have a long day at the racism factory. You're drunk already. Yeah. You're in this town of Aberfan, and you've got this guy coming to town in his limousine. He's wearing a great final suit, right? He is a complete officious Methodist prick, and he comes to the town and he looks at the tip just ponderously, looking over the elementary school. You complain to him, and he just does a British like stiff upper lip thing, and kind of tweaks you on the nose and walks away. This was like, this was state

capitalism, right? This is what the kinks were complaining about. This is what like, the Thatcherites were all complaining about was this kind of un, I don't know, unaccountable system that I guess these people in Aberfan are about to find out about. Yeah. Britain's brief experiment with dengism. I think you'll find this is actually good and perfect socialism on all of these people. All of these people are good socialists, and we should not criticize them in any way. Yeah. Socialism is when you get a private limo with a private registration plate, and the more limos you have, the more socialist you are.

That is true, as we know. Did you guys have Aaron Bestani on here? Not yet. No. He's, for the benefit of Justin and the listener, he's the guy who keeps writing these left takes about how communism means will have, will all have infinity poles. Yeah. Things of that nature. We'll all like have all of our treats and our luxuries, because robots all do it for us. Oh, sure. Why not? Sure. Why not? No. Yeah. He is like Elon Musk, Bracket Marxist, and it's like, yeah. I happen to be Elon Musk, Bracket Maoist, so. You're a Naxalite muskite, yeah.

Yeah. A muskite. I like it. So under the Lord's Robins administration of the National Coal Board, right, there were a lot of coal mines that were being closed if they were, you know, insufficiently productive, right? Because you got this mania for productivity, plus also employing way too many people, and coal is kind of like going downhill. Yeah. You have the contradiction of this like Keynesian consensus of this time, which is that you need to increase productivity, but you also need full employment. And as we all know, organic composition of capital, that is like completely

at loggerheads with itself. So something tells me in the next 10 years, this whole sort of post-war consensus might fall apart. I don't know. That's fine. This is socialism. You have a strong union. So all of these guys are union thugs, and there's like six different jobs to be like the guy who watches the guy who watches the guy. And it's, yeah, no, it's fine. Money union. Many Russian dog nesting union. Well, 100 unions bloom. There was an issue here where the National Union of Mineworkers, or the mineworkers who worked in the village, you know, they didn't really want to speak up on the spoil tip safety,

even if that directly threatened them physically, because they worried that if they have to make some expensive interventions into the spoil tip, right, then maybe Lord Robbins will just close the mine instead of doing the fixes. And they were right. I mean, this essentially happened like 20 years later to every Welsh and English mining community. So not for nothing. Were they worried about this? Oh, yeah. Just London really didn't want to pay for a TARP that big. That's about to say. That's a big fucking TARP. You know how much that costs? That probably costs like three or four dollars a square foot.

Especially those inefficient British factories, God. Yeah. You have to call up the National TARP Board. This place controls. Yeah. You get the TARP five years after the disaster, just like arrives on the truck. But it was only 20 shillings per square. I guess it would still be fun. Yeah. So in October of 1966, there were three weeks of heavy rain in Aberfan, right? There was about six and a half inches of rain that was mostly in the third week. So on the night of October 21st, the soil tip sank nine to 10 feet, right?

That's good. Less spoil. Yeah. That's true. And the little tramway that brought spoil up to the top, you know, the track fell in the hole that was left at the top, right? Now I'm feeling bad about this because it killed a railroad. Oh, yeah. A tiny little mine cart, but like... Absolute chat, though. Absolute chat. Absolute chat.

When the first shift came in the next day at 7.30am, someone found out this had happened. And you know, they ran back and said, hey, we got... They sent another mine cart down and just heard a thunk. Like kept doing that for an hour and ran out of mine carts. This is how 173 people died. You hear that? Thunk. Thunk. So they got an inspector out and he was like, okay, we shouldn't use this anymore.

Let's start trying to figure out a spot to put a new spoil tip, right? Fair enough. Okay. Yeah, exactly. All right. Move it somewhere else. Yeah. About an hour and 45 minutes later... That's never a good segway. Oh, boy.

Spoiled tip seven collapsed. Now there's a wave of debris about 30 feet high that traveled at 20 miles an hour down the hill and just overwhelmed the village of Aberfan, right? So among the things it smashes was the elementary school. Which is this building over here, right? Now you can see sort of excavation vehicles all around here, right? This is a picture taken well after the recovery after the gun, you know? When it actually happened, this would have been much deeper, right?

This collapse happened about 9.15 in the morning, right? So all the kids who were on time for school had made it in the school by then, right? Now this was... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Playing truant will save your life. Kids, don't arrive on time at school. This was a half day, too. Yeah.

Positive distance that should not show up for half days, period. So in the course of this, one of the first buildings is the school, right? It blows through all the windows, it goes into classrooms, fills the whole place up. 109 of the 240 kids in there were buried alive. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Fucking hell. I was hoping that you'd say something like,

oh, I just demolished the school, so at least it was fast. But no, you did not hear that. Get ahead of mercy. And there's stories of teachers putting chalkboards in front of doors and trying to shield the kids with their bodies, but they just killed a lot of people real quick. Man, just fucking like 100,000 tons of spoil coming down at you and you've got a chalkboard. What do you do, man? There's a story of, I believe, a lunch lady who shielded kids with her body

when they found the dunger out of the wreckage, obviously dead. She's still holding a pound note because that was the lunch buddy. All the kids involved that she had sacrificed for it did survive, but there's more than one story of people doing that and just being absolutely crushed to death by the land. This wouldn't have happened if we'd armed the teacher. This is true. Yeah, they could have shot the spoil coming down. Yes, the spoil full of bears.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Devo. We've been an active spoil spill drill. Yeah, I gotta say, man, this is in Wales, but if JD Vance who wrote Hillbilly Allergy was around, he'd be talking about how these 103 kids could have been saved if it wasn't for single motherhood and alcoholism, drug abuse. It's really the reason these kids died as a problem of culture. There was this Welsh Hillbilly culture. Yeah, for sure.

It's unfortunate they didn't have a coding class. Exactly. Well, apart from anything else, the computer is a little more solid and heavyweight than a chalkboard. Easy to hide behind. Right. Smaller area covered up. They have big tape drive computers, and you just shove those in front of the door. Yeah, nothing is getting through like a 50s IBM mainframe.

Absolutely fucking nothing. Let's be honest with ourselves. If they had had fancy computers back then, it would have just been the NBC running algorithms to figure out how many tons of individual pieces of enemy coal were in the actual tip itself right before it fell down. Oh, that's what Nate Silver's for, man. Nate Silver's second career. Yeah, Nate Silver mine.

Well, I can't wait for someone else to get real mad at us because we've made jokes. So sorry to answer whatever, but also go fuck yourselves. Yes. Also, it's Sean's fault because he picked this one. Well, the other one that I picked first had zero casualties and it didn't really land. Also, we'd have to criticize the Soviet Union in it, which we don't do because we're good leftists. We'd never criticize the Soviet Union.

If you know anything about us, it's that we are good tankies. Absolutely. Yeah, that's us. If only, if only the Atley government had been more Stalinist. If only there had been a sustained program of decool accusation. Yeah, none of these kids would have been at school. They'd have been fucking in a camp somewhere much safer. At least in a mine.

The casualties in the mine itself, right? So send all those cool kids down to the shaft. That's the tip. All right. All right. So 144 people were killed in total while we're making jokes. There were very few injuries. This is something where you either lived or you didn't.

Oh, shit. And so rescue efforts, right? So this is another view of the school, right? This is from the side. You can see a lot of miners coming out and they're trying to dig people out. The slide broke a water main, right? And as a result, the spoil tip continued to slowly settle through the village, you know, until about 1130 when the mains were turned off, right?

Oh, good. So you're trying to get into this like completely wrecked school and it's still like pumping coal slurry at you. Oh, yeah. This thing is like a living hell beast. It's just it won't die. The first miners got there before the emergency services did. They showed up about 20 minutes after the slide

and they started digging in like a really systemic fashion so to prevent further collapses, you know, because they're miners. They know how to dig stuff, right? One. Right. Autonomous community self, whatever. Cool. Yes.

They're like the best men on the job. And then later on, regular folks started to come to aid in the excavation with shovels and gardening tools and the miners were like, we know how to dig. Go away. Go away. You're making this worse. Yeah.

Autonomous community self, whatever. The downside. Yeah. It's not that weird that the miners got there first though because this is kind of the back of beyond and like at this point, like Welsh rural police and like emergency stuff is like one guy and a dog. So also the dog is not particularly useful. It's not like a sniffer dog or anything.

It's like an old sheep dog. Yeah. And it's asleep. Yeah. It shows up and falls asleep. Yeah. I like how Alice is introducing people across the Anglophone world to whales for the first time.

Hmm. Yes. I'm sure no one will get upset with how I characterize that. Congratulations, you're Britain's Mississippi. I was going to say Long Island actually, but Mississippi is probably kinder. Aw, Suffolk County. As a Jewish man, I am actually prohibited by a Torah law from insulting the great region of Long Island.

Or I assume my rabbi will come down here and beat my ass and ask me why I don't like locks. I actually have a thesis about whales being the Long Island of Britain, but it could wait till later. Cut the podcast out. It's just you reciting it. A three hour bonus. Yeah.

All right. So they started digging real quick, but Naan was pulled out alive of the pile after 11 p.m. that day, or 11 a.m. that day. Excuse me. And this happened like 9.30 in the morning when it actually tipped, right? Yeah. So that's, yeah. Feels like that's similar to the like my antique disaster.

We're just kind of keeps going. Oh, yeah. It's like either survived or you didn't. Right. There was a line in the wiki. I think about the idea that after it had stopped, so did the noise. One resident would call that quote in that silence. You couldn't hear a bird or a child.

So just digging for your possibly dead kid in absolute total silence would die to have no words for how horrible that would be. Yeah. Back to the jokes. Yeah. Lord Robbins of the National Coal Board. Yeah. Was informed of the disaster almost immediately after it happened.

What did he do to fix it? He decided to help next. Oh, he decided, he decided, I'm not going to go because, you know, that's going to interfere with the actual rescue efforts. I'm going to go be invested as the Chancellor of University of Surrey. Get the fuck out of here. That's so normal. He got to like go to a party and have like a little fucking

omen robe and a cap given to him. Cool. Yes. He could have been deemed the, I had a joke about the University of Surrey, but it was really bad. So let's just. Though. So he never visited though.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson did visit that day. You know, God forbid the National Coal Board guy visits. What? He said he didn't want to distract the actual experts because he was just some asshole, right? Yeah, pretty much. He was a layman or whatever. Okay, he said he was a layman.

And it's like, I mean, you're in charge of the Coal Board, dude. Yeah, you should probably be there. You're going to get the special number plate for the limo that says NCB1. You should probably go to the thing. I mean, bitch, anybody can use a shovel. Just put one in your hand and go for it, man. If I get a car, I'm going to get a vanity plate that says NCB1. Just put this on Liam's van.

Yeah. The most obscure reference of all time in America. I believe in you. One real spider will try to assassinate you when he sees it. So they were still digging through October 28th. That was when the last body was pulled out of the spoil. And there was pretty immediately a fund set up for the victims, which raised, I think, one in three quarters million pounds or something like that.

It was a good chunk of money. And that's in 1966. Yes. That's good money. That's good 1966 money. Absolutely. You could buy a lot of racism with that. Yeah.

That's back when you had shillings, too. So everything was worth like 21 times as much. And that's before two tone scar solved racism in Britain. Absolutely. Also, I have bad news for you, Raz. NCB1 is not available in Pennsylvania. Someone already has it. Wow.

Well, we got to find that guy. Yeah, we're going to have to. Justin, if you want that license plate, you're going to have to put it on a shrinking corn cob, because that's what you are right now. I don't know if you can register a shrinking corn cob as a motor vehicle. In a tractor. But you can like register the waino veil, right?

Yeah. They were tired. The corn cob. The Hershey Kiss mobile. So you could buy that. That's true. OK, so here's here's a picture from if you if we look back here. You can see here's where spoiled tip seven was.

And you can see how far down that answers your question about which one it was on the last slide with these. This is true. You can like if you go back to that one, it's like three slides back. You can get like a before and after. Yeah. Yeah, there she goes. That's a lot of spoiler.

That school there was spoiled. So in the aftermath, of course, there is a big, big inquiry. And, you know, they sort of place the blame on the fact that, well, actually, there were no safety procedures in place for spoiled tips anywhere in the world. Not just Great Britain, but anywhere. No, I never thought this was a dangerous thing, right? That's incredible.

That's genuinely fucking incredible to me. And yes, as the Tribunal of Inquiry said, the great bulk of mining operations take place below ground and that most of the best men in the industry are employed there, right? It is there that coal was won. And in that direction, that the attention of those employed in the industry is naturally turned. Rubbish tips are a necessary shit.

Rubbish tips are a necessary and inevitable adjunct to a coal mine, even as a dustbin is to a house. But it is playing that miners devote certainly no more attention to rubbish tips than householders do to dustbins. Justin, we lost Alice. Did we? Yeah, I saw her drop off. There was a little notification.

Uh-oh. Yeah, I don't know what happened. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. Let's see if she comes back. All right, I'm going to I'm going to pee real quick. I'll be right back. Taking the fuck out by a power cut. Just keep going without me.

All right. Oh, boy. Alice is dead. Alice is dead. I'm also going to use the restroom. God damn it, dude. All right, I am the only one recording. Hi, everybody.

Welcome to what is now just Liam's disaster cast. We're all very happy to have you or I am very happy to have you. Today, we'll be talking about the disaster that is currently my living room because we currently now have a rowing machine in the middle of that. And now it is time to read the fan fix on air. Talk amongst yourselves while I get these up. All that being said, actually, I kind of wanted to say a couple of things, which is that I please tell me someone else's back.

I'm I'm struggling here. I'm back. Thank God. I was I was reading the fan fix live on air. Oh, very nice. Yeah. Um, I wonder if Alice will have her audio if she was attacked by Iranian hackers or whatever. That's right, we just back to just go on.

Is Alice gone for good? I mean, good question taken out by a power. She lost power, I think. Oh, that's because like Donald Trump said, in Scotland with the wind farms, you get intermittent electricity. That is true, as we know. Maybe we should call the whole time. That's what I'm thinking.

Yeah, I think that strikes me the most about this fucking disaster is just the absolute like, I feel like not uniquely British, but very British kind of callousness about the whole thing. Where it's just like people, we're very sorry you're in mourning, but also like, but how are we going to pay for it in a way that's just so genuinely fucking unbelievable to me? This is the society that 40 years later did Brexit callously like, you know, just hating on themselves in the world because they were pissed off about it. And the more I think about it, the more I feel like this whole disaster was a kind of a preamble to Brexit.

It's it's it's insane in that like, we'll get into it by, you know, taking money from the survivors fund that they had raised themselves to pay for the removal, you know, of the of the remaining tips, like shit like that. Dude, yeah, exactly. And they had to pay it back like many years later, but just I don't understand how you can like, like at some point, it's like, oh, we don't have any money. It's like, you're the fucking Prince Tom. Like, you're the government.

You make the money. You make it exactly literally like, oh my god. So no one is found to be at fault for this disaster personally, but the National Coal Board is found to be at fault generally and has to pay out compensation to victims, right? And they they wound up trying to pay out 50 pounds per child. Get out. I fucking saw that.

Get the fuck out of here. And later they they they increased that to 500 pounds. Fuck you. Would you like to know how much like 50 pounds was this 1966? Yeah. Yeah, 782 pounds. Fuck you. You're talking maybe a thousand dollars for kid.

I mean, I that's what I'm talking about. Just the absolute fucking unbelievable callousness of the shit. That doesn't even come close to burying somebody. You could buy an Xbox for your other kid. While that is a good point. Justin is voting for Andrew Yang, by the way. If you just have a kid killed every year in a spoil collapse, it's like a yang bag. You know, it's like that thousand dollars a month or whatever.

Freedom dividend. Yeah. Yeah, those neat bucks for nephew, entombed and entirely entirely entirely in in spoil tiff. So that's what that stood for. I never know. Yeah, yeah. It's a Britishism. All right.

So Lord Robin got the the the whole report about 10 days before the media did or any of the public did right about this whole incident. And he decided to spend that time traveling around the country to campaign for virtues of coal and coal power and how coal was what made Britain great. And also to fear monger about. He was Joe Manchin, you know, Joe Manchin of the Labour Party. And also to fear monger about nuclear power, which was increasingly popular in Britain at that time. Oh, man.

He's not on your good side, is he? All right. So they finally drew up some safety regulations around spoil tip design after this. And the spoil tips were removed at Aberfan. It was a little complicated by the fact that spoil tip five was on fire. What? Sure. I I I mentioned I I read this in the report.

I couldn't do a search to figure out when it caught fire. I assumed it had been on fire for a long time. That happens. It's just normal. Everything's fine. This is great. Stuff catches fire sometimes. And sometimes it just doesn't go out.

We should go to Centralia. It's 50 million year old dinosaur bones that just seem to want to burn forever. It's fine. On the bright side, when they increased it to 500 pounds, that would be 7,825 pounds today. So you could buy yourself like a Nissan Micra. That's nothing to stick at, man. That's true. New or old 1960s version of that car, though.

It was it was probably one of those weird things with three wheels. Whatever said, Austin Mini. The more a Morris Marina. Oh, yeah, buddy. The one child killed in a spoil. You could have a Morris Marina. There's probably a British Leyland something or other from the coincidentally, NCB National Car Board.

There's probably an actual name for it. It took four years for them to come off the assembly line. But man, that was some crap, I'm sure. So it just means at some point that the wheels are going to fall off. Now, interestingly, in hearings in parliament, Margaret Thatcher was a particular advocate for the village here and getting the spoil tips removed, you know, up until the point where the government would spend money on it. Right.

So the cause to removing the spoil tips was deducted from the victim's fund. Yeah, they were forced to pay it in contravention of British law. And the and the charity commission, the group set up to prevent it like that, just stood by and did nothing. So fucking absolutely terrific work there, folks. Yeah. And then later in 1989, Margaret Thatcher closed the mind. So, you know, thank you.

That start and end it with, you know, this is crazy because Hey, I'm back. Hey, we're about to just do historical materialism. You're awesome. I love to do historical materialism. I also love to have my power go out in the middle of recording a podcast. Well, that's what you get for relying on wind power. Absolutely.

It's probably probably Iranian cyber terrorists. Yeah, that's true. You can't like store power. So, folks, there's no wind. And when there's no wind, there's no power. It's very bad. What it was was off the coast of Scotland, some beautiful, beautiful rare flock of birds not seen in that area for 50 years,

just in the wrong place. I just got completely destroyed and that's why she lost power. Yeah, absolutely. So there's going to be, yeah, there's going to be a gap in my recording at about like, I don't know, 49 minutes in where I just like fucking die and then come back. So congratulations on your resurrection. Everyone's going to hear the rest of us milling around in confusion. So I talked about the fan picks, although I couldn't find them on my phone.

So I'm going to have to get them back somehow. Should I historical materialism? Yeah, that's what we're going to do. Let's do historical materialism. Let's do it. So like, so it's fascinating this story because we talked about the contradictions within this sort of Keynesian post-war consensus and how you had to full employment.

You also had to have some productivity gains at the same time. You had kind of heterogeneous national economies where the heights of industry were nationalized for the national interest with this sort of like soft social democratic welfare state that existed at this time. And then early on in 1966, when this disaster happens, killing all these kids, you have the siren who appears Margaret Thatcher. And she is directly with the effects of British state capitalism, right? Which like not directly, but at least indirectly this entire edifice,

this social economic edifice kills all these fucking children. It's Margaret Thatcher fucking 13 years before she comes to power, who steps into the breach as the harbinger of a new social order of a new era of neoliberalism. So this is a very, this event is very pregnant, pregnant with the future. As Margaret Thatcher destroys the minor union, you know, 25 years after that, and eventually they reprivatize the mines and then they go away. So this is a perfect story, not just Brexit, but the entirety of neoliberalism. All right, hashtag, no more historical materials, it's done now.

Backslash, backslash, historical materials. Damn, I had some much more facile lessons to be learned here. While I was dead, did you talk about them making the victims fund pay for cleanup? That's wild. You're British. What do you, is that normal there? What the fuck? I think it sort of used to be like this kind of like Britain is a dismal country. And so our flirtation with socialism had to be tempered with absolute paternalistic dipshit cruelty. And so, yes, you can have a nationalized industry, but it will be the kind

of nationalized industry that is like, oh, sorry, we killed your kid. Here's 50 pounds. Also, we're taking 25 of that back to pay for cleaning up the, you know, corpses. Because we're piss picks. We're a nation of piss picks and we love it. Yeah. Incidentally, how much is 50 quid in today's money? I already gave it all out. Liam's got it. Yeah, it's like 782 pounds, I think. 782 pounds and 41 pence. Awesome. For a child, for a dead child, yeah.

Yeah, cool. You can buy, I don't know, what can you buy with 700, but you buy like a PlayStation? I said Xbox earlier, but yeah. Fucking console scum. You could not buy a good gaming PC with your dead child money. We had the Eagles giants and now it's PlayStation Xbox. Like, we can't say, we cannot say PC gaming master race here. No. So I say PC gaming Soviet Socialist Republic. New Soviet Gamer. Yeah, the new Soviet Gamer.

Have you heard of this new game, Workers and Resources Soviet Republic? Boo! I tried that. I tried that and I could not figure out power generation. So in that respect, I was absolutely accurate about playing a Soviet bureaucrat. Yeah, I was just like, why does number go up, but power does not happen? I don't understand. And then I just gave up, which is like sort of the equivalent of being reassigned to manage a shoe factory in Kazakhstan.

Then the game got weird. I worked with an ex-Soviet man. He and his wife had emigrated, I think in like 94 or 95. And he was just a delight because every so often he would threaten our boss. But like he was like a physically imposing man. He was probably like six, seven, six, eight. And our boss would be like, oh, you know, whatever productivity dumb bullshit capitalism. And he would he would just stand over him and say, what do you say to me?

And there was no problem. Like, all right, yeah, get his ass. We should open up Russian immigration just so that every workplace in America can have one of those guys. That might help us get state capitalism. We need to work our way up to this kind of state capitalism that kills your children. That's the sad part. That's what Bernie Sanders is fighting for.

That's only we had, we had, we had that choice with Corbyn and we returned it down. If only mining disasters killed your children instead of being unable to afford insulin. I tell you what, there is there is a silver lining to this, which is if your child dies, you sort of love on insulin. This is true, yes. My favorite part about when we go to Canada is our inevitable like, yeah, I'm going to go just buy a bunch of cheap insulin over the counter. In addition to God, the entire one, because it's still OTC there.

Thanks, Canada. See, if you brought the Russian guy over from the old Soviet Union, he could take that and turn it into crocodile for you. The reverse of this is that one of the silver linings of the destruction of the Soviet Union is that Easter dial, aka the pills, what you take to make you transgender are available over the counter in Russia. I know, right? Yeah, you can just fucking pick up a whole fucking like stack of them.

You want big girl? You can be girl. Most efficient allocation of tips in like in the whole fucking world. Yeah, it doesn't work for the collapse of kind or whatever the hell I'm talking about. It was the gains made by the Soviet Union, the historical gains that allowed Russia to have what it has today. Yes, the absolute, the best dash cam videos in the world. And there was the losses of British social democracy that led to the losses of Britain today.

That's true. Our dash cams are shit. It's just like two very red men trying to slap each other and then someone gets stabbed. It's dismal. Fucking English. All right, so I was going to conclude by saying my less historical materials, lessons from this, I guess, are maybe don't hold the thread of closure of the mine over your workers because that may restrict them from saying maybe we should fix these safety issues.

And I guess, yeah, even nationalized industries are subjected to these pressures. When you run them like a capitalist, a state capitalist enterprise, absolutely. And, you know, don't concentrate all your health and safety efforts around the money making part of the business, which, you know, very much is what happened. Fun fact, the head of the National Cold War, the Lord we were talking about, his job in later life, his like, cynical that they gave him after this, was the inquiry that like developed extant British health and safety law. And oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he sort of invented self-regulation where you would just like decide for yourself that your workplace was safe. Yeah, that was also what I was going to say. So yeah, it works. God damn it. Yeah. So self-regulation. Well, I mean, all right, you can't argue with results.

When was the last time a mine slide killed 100 kids? Hmm. That is true. Next week. Yeah, multiple times. And yeah, doing the sort of tapping my temple and being like, can't have a mine slide disaster if there's no mines. Yes, you can outsource all your mine slide disasters to the third world, right?

It's look, different places have different safety standards. And that's OK. Alice Iglesias over here. God, that that fucking column is like, I don't know. You take psychic damage from thinking about it. That's all. And the ship that they put when they sent that satellite into space and they put all the nice music in the pretty pictures,

they should have just sent that Madaglacias article into space to let the aliens know who we really are. Yeah, although like it's kind of fucked up that the the Voyager Golden Record has an introduction from the secretary general of the UN who was a legit Nazi war criminal. So that's that's yeah, that's that's our like eternal like record of humanity as we fucking have this Nazi being like, hey, check out all of our cool cultural stuff.

Klaus Barbie in space. Yeah. Here I was thinking to be Kissinger. No, he's glistened. He didn't become an American. He didn't become a worker until he got here, man. Hmm. That's an American story.

Yes. Yeah. Horatio Alger. Imagine if Kissinger ran the National Colboard. I see no problem. There wouldn't be a lot more losses. That's all I was saying. Mad because there's not enough death.

Yeah, we have to expand the Coltslide into neighboring villages. That's the only way we can defeat these villages is by like spreading the cold. Very safe. We only killed 100 kids. We had to landslide the village in order to save it. Yeah. Well, now that we've all been canceled for the thousandth time.

Yeah. Yes. Oh, sorry, folks, or whatever. Yeah, we but we hope you will hold off on our cancellation long enough for us to put out our next episode on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, of course. Of course. Finally.

There we go. Yeah. And we've got a Patreon episode in the works, too. We do have a Patreon episode. Which is going to be Liam's van, right? It is literally, yeah, going to be my van. So that I'm in the process of writing that. There's lots to talk about recording that, but yeah.

So enjoy 45 minutes to an hour and a half of me just bitching and moaning about the L31 engine. Van content. Yeah. No. It's going to be great. Liam Vanerson, man with van. Yeah, Liam Vanerson.

See, and I'll talk to you later. Adam. Okay. Well, that's the end of the episode. Who wants to pitch stuff? Listen to Trash Future. We have a podcast. It's very good.

We have a Patreon, too. We're doing, we're calling this season two after we all got owned in the British election. So yeah. Time for every brand. Yes. New year, new me. Yeah. Listen to Trash Future.

It's one of my favorite podcasts. Check out Justin's excellent city skyline shit on YouTube.com. Listen to this podcast a lot, but then we're not doing that. Listen to the Antifada, my podcast. You can find it wherever free podcasts are sold. I've got some exciting new history episodes with your friend, Matt Crispin, coming up very, very soon. You can follow me on Twitter.com at TalentedVoter.

And yeah, I'm hyped to be here. One of my favorite shows, this one as well. Oh, I'll bless you. Yes. Thank you. Nice. Bye, going. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. All right. So I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. My name is Liam Anderson. I by and large am just an asshole in our YouTube comments and on our Twitter comments when you dumb fucks want to be transphobic and gross. We are getting around to all the fucking episodes you people have mentioned, but Braz has to write them.

I'm very sorry. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Definitely go listen to Trash Feature. It is an extremely good podcast. Bring back the dead cast, I guess. Yes.

RIP, the dead cast. Oh, and just to be an asshole one more time. Pronouns are he, him. Suck a dick. Oh, yeah. She has. Todd Hose, Die Mad. Also, he, him.

I don't have to pitch anything because Sean did all the work for me. Distribution of labor. All right. I'm a good union man. What can I say? Now we can slack off, guys. It's a five hour coffee break. Yeah, we should also put in some sad coal mining songs in the YouTube description.

We should get some like, we should fucking unionize podcasters. I want to be in an international brotherhood of something. That is so good. I can't write a dual card, but I'll help you form it. Yeah. You know what I want? I want one of those stickers you put on the hard hat that says like Union Motherfucker and there's like a dog.

Alice, I'll send you one. After this, I'll send you a Union Motherfucker sticker for your hard hat. Please. Left unity as a part. A power to the union. Hey, it's your fucking union. It's the fucking union that works for you. Oh, is that a podcast?

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a podcast. I'm going to, uh, buy everyone. Bye. Bye. Okay, bye. What do I do now? I hit stop recording and then I send it to you.

Yes, please stop.