The morning of the disaster, unbeknown to those at the foot of the mountain, the large tip had been made unsteady by a build-up of water.<\/p>\n
Then, at 09:15, the 150,000-tonne pile of slurry came roaring down the slope, crashing into the primary school and engulfing the building.<\/p>\n
“I heard this terrible noise,” said Mair.<\/p>\n
Her classroom was in a separate building from the main school and, through the windows, she saw a playground wall had collapsed so she instinctively gathered her pupils and led them out.<\/p>\n
She walked them down to the steps by the main road and stood with them, trying to keep calm as mothers began rushing to the school: “If you’re calm, they’re calm as well.”<\/p>\n
One by one, the children were collected and while her pupils had escaped the devastation of the slurry, some of their families had not been so fortunate. <\/p>\n
“A little boy in my class lost his mother and sister,” she recalled, adding that he had to be picked up by his aunt.<\/p>\n
She also remembered a teacher from another school, Bill Evans, whose house was next door to Pantglas.<\/p>\n
“He lost his wife, baby, and his son – who should have been in school but had tonsillitis so was home. He lost his complete family.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The morning of the disaster, unbeknown to those at the foot of the mountain, the large tip had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-440909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}