Aberfan taught us a lot. Mostly, of course, that those in power cannot be trusted. Correction: must not be trusted.

Too sweeping?

I might have thought so until 60 years ago this week when I stood alongside mothers weeping and praying as they watched their husbands digging for the bodies of their children who lay crushed beneath the ruins of their little school .

The parents’ faces were black, save for the streaks of white from their tears. Two hours earlier those men had been digging coal from deep beneath the ground. With the coal, of course, came the waste that would have to be separated to become the great mounds that disfigured every mining valley.

My best friend’s father was a miner. I had been a reporter on the local paper and I once went down the mine to watch him at work. I begged to return to the surface after no more than an hour of breathing in the deadly coal dust.…