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
And so one of the guys was sent down the hill to kind of raise the news that the pile was unsteady.
And while he was gone, it suddenly slipped.
It was an avalanche, effectively, of kind of fine, wet, powdery slurry and muck and these tailings that I described, and it kind of thundered down the mountain.
It kind of came thundering down on people in the village, compared it to the sound of a low-flying jet.
Two schools there.
There was the primary school and the secondary school.
And it sort of, the main force of the tip struck the primary school and a few houses next to it.
And it just came down just as the kids were finishing off school prayers for the last day of term before the half-term break.
And they were suddenly buried.
144 people died, 116 children.
So within hours, the village is besieged by well-meaning offers of help, which become overwhelming.
So you've got ambulances, you've got industrial machinery, you've got miners coming off their shifts desperate to help.
You've got earth-moving equipment.
You've got this just kind of outpouring of...
of a desire to help, even though it's impossible to help.
No one was pulled alive after 11 o'clock in the morning.
the scale of the tragedy, the fact that so many children were involved, the fact that on some level this was foreseen in the sense that the practice of piling waste like this was just so obviously reckless.
All of those things kind of combined immediately to make it a singular tragedy in the British imagination.
Immediately you've got anger against the National Coal Board, which is the nationalized organization sort of in charge of the British coal industry, because this was obviously dangerous, this was obviously reckless.
You've got a kind of a class dimension in terms of this is a village for workers and their families, and they're the ones who've been hit by this thing.
Showing 21–40 of 180 · page 2 of 9
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