Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children | Hacker News Reader

Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children

bbc.co.uk

131 pointsPatient057 comments

I read the wikipedia article rather than the linked BBC article.

What struck me was the boneheaded greed of the National Coal Board. Pettily resisting things like 'move the giant pile which killed all the kids, away from the village' because it would cost so much. When the costs are not all that much on government scale, even adjusting for inflation. They initially wanted to compensate the families with £50 (!!) per dead kid. Eventually they raised that to £500 and called it "generous". None of the jokers in question suffered any real consequences for it.

Really shines a dim light on the UK government around that time.

Using an online inflation calculator, £50 in 1966 is equivalent to £873 today. £500 is £8,731. Wow. Still startling.

I thought the next sentence was even more shocking: "A more substantial sum, it was advised, would have destroyed the working class recipients not used to large amounts of money."

That was a common meme about the poor repeated by the rich. It still lives, sometimes in a more sophisticated form, eg. poor people don't know how to manage spending, not buying in bulk, not taking advantage of discounts, etc., when in reality, in practice, most things cost more when you are poor because you can't afford to wait for good opportunities, and people are actually doing the best they can it their circumstances.

Also, if anything, I find that people who are lower-middle class tend to be better with their money than many of the "elite" -- not better as in taking advantage of unattainable economic tools, but perhaps more conservative with purchases, and such.

Why is that so shocking?

In another thread today, people were arguing that there was nothing at all wrong with a bunch of investors jacking the price of a drug used to treat lead poisoning by 2700%.

Aristocrats and people who worship capitalism are pretty much the same... charging $750 for a $2 pill is no different than paying 50 quid for a dead kid.

I am not seeing the "bonehead" part of it. Just banal evil.

> I read the wikipedia article rather than the linked BBC article.

Me too. It's a matter of getting to the point.

We read about similar disasters happening today in third world countries and we think "It's all due to the corruption in those places; such things could never happen in developed places". It is really thought-provoking to think about how not very long ago they did.

Had a conversation with a Chinese colleague after the huge explosion in Tianjin; they were worried that this sort of thing - industrial accidents, spillages, etc. - was happening in China all the time and they wondered why it didn't happen in the west. Of course these things all happened in western countries in the past - My feeling was that china is going through a hundred and fifty years of growth in a couple of decades. It takes an Aberfan, or a Boston molasses flood, or a Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, to get a country to fix the liability and legal frameworks it needs. And China is going through all those learning events in a much compressed timeframe. Open question whether it's actually learning from these events, too.

But why should they even need to make the mistakes to learn from themselves? The lessons are already there from decades of other countries' disasters and solutions.

Because distance reduces disaster's cost, and in every industry the guys who operate on luck can deliver cheaper and faster than the guys who do it right. One of those groups will kill someone eventually, but until they do they'll out compete everyone.

Everything that can go wrong will go right, and you'll take more risks every time, winning every time, until you experience catastrophic failure.

I know it is cynical, but a part of it also is because it isn't worthwhile for them yet.

If large numbers of people cannot afford to say "I won't work/live there because it is too dangerous", a capitalist doesn't need to work on safety.

That's why, for example, clothes factories can get away with counteracting the "employees may steal stuff" risk by locking down windows and emergency exits or why coal mining companies can ignore all kinds of warnings of upcoming disasters, even if similar warnings have been followed by deadly 'accidents' recently and in the same company.

If someone does take these things into consideration, it will supposedly slow them down and cost them money. There's always someone else who is willing to do the job without these hindrances.

Similarly, one of my children hurt themselves climbing a tree and ended up in hospital. Our other child was taking high risks a week later. My second child said "it won't happen to me".

Greed. There is always someone who profits from lax standards and will weild political influence to hinder change.

Mostly, it takes a massive disaster that hits home to overcome this.

Because the foreign investors don't want to learn those lessons.

Textile mills moved from places like Lowell, MA and Utica, NY to the south for more docile workers and lower safety standards. They moved to Bangladesh for even cheaper workers and no regulation.

Not just other countries - even people in the US are ready and eager to roll many regulations back in the name of profit.

Wagging fingers in hindsight doesn't do a heck of a lot, does it?

And let's not pretend that it's some exceptional part of human nature to need to touch the stove.

I think there are some similarities with the lead poisoning in Flint.

Poor alignment of interests, a disinterested external regulator, economic malaise, etc.

Indeed, and by pushing the production of goods far away from the people who consume them, modern industrial capitalism makes it easier for the consumer to ignore things like this when they do happen. After all, they're happening to foreign people far away, not to people next door, people Like Us™.

You can see that logic in action in this infamous 2013 essay by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, arguing that "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK": http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international...

Exporting production to less developed countries inarguably raises the standard of living in those countries. There is a cost in the form of increased risk from some sources; manufacturing accidents, pollution, etc. However, this is more than offset by the increase in food production, lifespan, medical care, and everything else that comes with being a production economy.

The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" just indicates that you are from a culture that's forgotten what it takes to modernize and improve. You can't build an industrial base off nostalgic dreams of agrarianism.

It's not inarguable at all. There is a third option besides agrarian subsistence and modern industrial subsistence: global partnership an fair trade, instead of Westerners profiting from Eastern misery.

> The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy"

Where did I say that, exactly? I welcome the opening up of economic opportunities to these populations. I just think that they deserve the same protections and pay for doing those jobs that Westerners would receive if they were the ones doing them, rather than just being pawns in a global system of labor arbitrage.

It's a bit rich to get up on a moral high horse and then declare from that elevated position that the life of a Bangladeshi worker is worth less than that of an American one. Companies aren't setting up in these countries because they are benevolent actors looking to help them develop their economies. They're setting up there because they can exploit the workers there in ways that they can't get away with doing back home anymore.

Workers in developed economies had to endure a century of bloody struggle to claw those protections into place; I would rather we construct an economy that allows this new class of workers to get them for themselves without having to suffer through that.

Nobody is claiming their lives are worth less: it's clear OP does not feel that way, and it's mean to imply otherwise. But very sadly their labor is currently worth a lot less, and regulations that try to force a change (like any other economic price floor) in that will severely reduce demand for their labor and limit their economic opportunities.

Matt Iglesias is the quintessential illustration of why US voters are flocking to politic outsiders and saying the D and R are just two sides of the same bad coin.

Aberfan was 1960s.

Fukushima was 2000s

Flint was 2010s

It wasn't "ago", it is an ongoing battle. The greed and evil reappear whenever we get complacent.

As Faulkner famously put it: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The problem isn't individual greed that keeps reappearing, it's the collective and cultural greed that makes the individual greed short-term attractive.

I always think that the sign of a good system (be it a country or a company or whatever) is not that mistakes don't happen. But that the same mistakes don't happen twice.

It's not as simple as don't have a school gathering under a landslide risk after heavy rain. The tips were a known danger. The mistake was in preventing their removal. This mistake happened because those at risk didn't have the power to act in their own interest. Preventing such mistakes in the future would require empowerment of the proletariat.

We still buy the gold and cobalt lined products. We have externalized the disasters.

Everybody just wants a successful social life and career. Countercultures are small outliers seen as unrelatable.

There had also been warnings about Fukushima, and they were ignored. Profit-driven corporations will always cut corners if they can.

Unless they have management that cares about the future of the company.

Management can always find another job, and cutting corners can be crucial in keeping your current one.

That's exactly it. Too often, management is judged on short term performance. Risks are often ensured, or taken by daughter company that can be dropped. And even when not, they may believe the risk is so small that it's worth taking.

Especially when margins are low, cutting some corners for a small drop in costs can lead to a large increase in profits. And when the damage done to society as a whole, the lives lost, the radiation released, and the animals drowned in your oil, are not on your balance sheet, they don't directly factor into the decision. Only the money they have to pay as a result does, and that's never enough to undo the damage, and often not even enough to scare other companies from cutting similar corners, because letting those companies really pay, would bankrupt it and costs jobs.

It's perverse incentives all over the place.

That's not how business works. If you wrecklessly drove a company into the ground, you're going to have a hard time finding another leadership position at another company.

That's not how business works. If you can show that you saved the corporation massive amounts of money, and that "the incident" was a one-in-a-million that would _never_ happen to the new corporation, then of course they will hire you for management. See: HP, Yahoo, etc.

Oh really? Why hasn't this guy found another job yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling

He made the company tons of money. I'm sure he would claim it "would never happen" to the new company as well. Yet he's not exactly leading up another energy company, is he?

Because he's in jail?

I hat those layouts. Just give me a static page, maybe chop the article into separate bits and hyperlink them. But this... it's like it was made by tv people who hate reading. I don't know.

I dunno. I agree that readability is important, but I love the impact that creative design can have on the reader too. The pictures in this story, and creative design decisions like draping the whole thing in shades of black (echoing the blackness of coal and the polluted industrial sky) highlight the story's horror.

There's room for both approaches; print magazines have long ranged from those with utilitarian layouts to those with lavish, creative layouts, after all. So there's no reason to assume the Web can't be the same.

I think this is the worst design I've ever seen, with the background image zooming out as I scroll. Extremely distracting.

If you make the browser window narrow enough the background images are disabled and it becomes readable.

mobile layout is less cinematographic btw, pretty much like a normal blog layout

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739

When one paints the bike shed hot pink with pea-green accents and puts the bike rack itself on the roof, some discussion of it is to be expected.

It was nice on my phone

I was almost exactly 1 year old when the Aberfan disaster occurred so I have no direct memories.

But what I do remember from the subsequent few years was the look of absolute horror and fear that came over my mothers face any time it was mentioned.

"To reach an appropriate sum the Charity Commission proposed asking grief-stricken parents ‘exactly how close were you to your child?’; those found not to have been close to their children would not be compensated."

I have no words for this...

Edit: My god, it just gets worse:

"Mercifully, the proposal was never acted upon. The NCB initially offered £50 before raising it to the "generous offer" of £500. A more substantial sum, it was advised, would have destroyed the working class recipients not used to large amounts of money"

The tech developed by https://shorthand.com/ has a small credit at the foot of this story.

This kind of journalistic work makes worthwhile all the labors of internet people. Browsers, Javascript, routers, servers, security, even JPEG, come together here to retell the story of that disaster, along with good writing and photography. Let's hope the right people see this history and learn from it

Surely there is a value in pretty presentations and from a technical point it is quite impressive.

Still I just couldn't stop myself from changing white to gold-ish (#c1af57) and found it much better then white text hovering over black and white photos with a darkened layer between them.

Is it just me or do the survivor counts make no sense in this article?

> 240 pupils of the Victorian red brick Pantglas Junior School

> The 10th and last child to be brought out alive, he was treated for head and stomach injuries.

> A further 28 children were injured, many seriously.

> There are thought to be about 20 or so of the surviving children left in Aberfan.

> They had registered the deaths of 116 children

So… only 10 were pulled out alive, but 20+ survived? 28 were injured, but not dead, but not pulled out alive? 124 weren't registered as dead?

There were 240 pupils, 116 of whom were killed. 28 were injured, 10 of whom had been trapped and needed to be brought out. So 96 of the pupils were not physically affected.

Only 20 of the (then-) children still live in Aberfan.

Small correction: "A further 28 children were injured".

I read that as 38 were injured, 10 of whom were trapped, leaving 86 who weren't physically injured.

Thank you, I found the numbers difficult to follow, too.

The pictures show the spoil hit the side of the school, but didn't completely cover it. Wikipedia says "struck the northern side of Pantglas Junior School".

Perhaps not all the classrooms were affected, and some groups of children (and teachers) simply walked out of the damaged building, without needing to be rescued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster -- there are a lot of references, I expect the official report is amongst them somewhere.

The article mentions in passing that one class of five year olds had been taken for a walk and weren't hurt.

This from the article:

    “As if nature had realised that a
     tremendous mistake had been made
     and nature was speechless.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com