Sam Knight
speaker
180 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Sam Knight’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She described waking up and experiencing a choking sensation and felt like she couldn't breathe, a kind of physical sensation in her throat and struggling to breathe.
So Aberfan was built pretty rapidly during the second half of the 19th century to be a mining village.
100%.
It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground.
You would mine the coal, take the good coal, and then there would be the debris, the waste from that, and also particularly something called tailings, which is the coal which is too fine, the kind of powdery stuff that's sort of too fine to use or to sort of sell or to kind of package up in a useful form.
And then that would be hoisted onto a kind of tramway.
Can you imagine something a bit like a ski lift?
Sort of
hauling cartload after cartload after cartload up the hill where it would kind of reach the top where there would be a small gang of men, six guys, and then they would kind of unhook the topmost cart and tip it onto the waste pile.
And these heaps would grow and grow on the hillside until they would become unstable.
And then the coal plant would shift the tramways to another part of the hillside and make a new one.
It'd been raining for weeks, and the men working on the tip had noticed it shifting and starting to shift down the hillside.
You could sort of take a reading off a tree or a fence post.
There was a particular dead tree that...
the men kind of kept an eye on and they could see that the pile was beginning to shift.
And that kind of wasn't unusual in itself.
It was kind of normally a sign that it's like, okay, you know, we've put enough here time to kind of move on and make a new one.
But the rain had been intense.
And that morning, the group of men in charge of the heap noticed it had sunk 10 feet down the hillside in the night.
And they were unhappy about the state of it.
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