[dfwgator]

I think of all of the disasters I have ever read about, it may very well be the saddest one of all.

[Rockingham]

TV news clips at the time showed the locals desperately trying to dig out the village and its school. It was all to no avail, and it was painfully easy for me to imagine a disaster leveling my elementary school and setting the parents to digging through the debris for their children.

It bears mention that the true culprits in the Aberfan disaster were not the deadly heap of mining waste but those who built and permitted the menace, the socialized British coal industry and the British Coal Board, the government's plenary supervisor of the coal industry. For all the talk of socialism being an expression of worker power, in practice, socialism commonly leads to the neglect of worker safety as the government's interests as proprietor tend to outweigh safety concerns.