Remembering Aberfan

In a photojournalistic career spanning the tumultuous ’60s, covering many big stories for Life magazine, one in particular has always stood out in Chuck Rapoport’s memory. The one he can never forget is the aftermath of the October 1966 tragedy in Aberfan. In the small mining town in Wales, one of the seven ‘tips”piles of coal mining waste that formed man-made hills around the town’collapsed, causing an avalanche that killed 144 people, 116 of them children. ”The young photojournalist, the father of a 4-month old son, watched with the rest of the world the TV coverage of the Aberfan disaster. ‘My first instinct was, ‘I wish I was there to photograph what was going on,” Rapoport recently recalled. ”When the tip collapsed, it also hit a water main, right above the town school, and the water mixed with earth crushed the school. Many children, mostly ages 9 to 11, died at the start of their school day. Other people in homes and stores nearby were also buried by the avalanche. ”Life magazine was already publishing a story on the disaster. But Rapoport, 68, pitched another story idea to his editor. He wanted to go to Aberfan after all the other photographers had left. ‘I wanted to photograph a town without children,’ he told the Palisadian-Post. ”His editor agreed, and Rapoport left for Wales 10 days after the tragedy, after the rest of the world’s media had left, and stayed for seven weeks. Although the surviving town members, in deep mourning, did not immediately extend their trust to the visiting ‘Yank,’ he slowly made inroads with them, allowing him to take haunting images in their homes, at the cemetery, at the pub, and of surviving children playing by themselves, which formed a Life 10-page article and photo essay, ‘Aberfan: Stirrings of New Life’ in January 1967. ”The people of Aberfan ‘came off a whole week, hundreds of newsmen sticking microphones in their faces. They hated the press,’ Rapoport recalls. ‘I had to convince them I was more of a poet with a camera.’ ”Two years before the tragedy, Rapoport says, scientists and geologists had issued a report that one of the tips was built on a running spring, and they didn’t know what effect it would have. When it rained heavily prior to the slide, the tip became unstable because it didn’t have a solid foundation, and went down. ”Almost 40 years after the tragedy, Rapoport’s black-and-white photos are now being displayed in Aberfan, and concurrently printed in a book, ‘Aberfan: The Days After: A Journey in Pictures.’ Rapoport, a Palisadian since 1978, will speak on his book Thursday, April 21, at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. ”November and December in Wales in 1966 were cold and rainy. The slide kept collapsing more, creating a filthy river down the street, Rapoport says. The stark landscape, with hills denuded of trees, created a backdrop for his photos of the townspeople. ”Over the time he was there, Rapoport found various emotional reactions among the survivors. ‘Women dealt with what had to be done,’ he says. After cleaning up the accident, ‘the men had a hard time facing their grief.’ They spent a lot of time in the pub. ‘People had to overcome a tremendous amount of grief under difficult circumstances. They were all poor. There was a lot of alcoholism, and it doubled after that.’ ”But Rapoport was especially interested in the reactions of the surviving kids. ‘They hid out,’ he says. ‘They felt they could not be seen on the streets playing. For the parents who lost their kids, it was too much for them to see.’ ”Rapoport stayed in a room above the pub for most of his time there and, although never a drinker, started drinking as a way to bond with the men, and also to deal with the emotional effects of the tragedy. ‘People used me, an outsider, as a kind of counselor. Something they couldn’t tell friends, they would tell me.’ He was alone until his wife Mary and son Benjamin joined him for the last two weeks. ”He also photographed images of hope, such as laughing schoolchildren, or the first baby born in Aberfan after the tragedy, whom he captured moments after the birth. ”Five years later, Rapoport, by then a father of two sons and tired of the constant traveling required by photojournalism, shifted to a screenwriting and television writing career, eventually relocating to Los Angeles. ”Currently, he is combining his love of writing and photography and working on an autobiography about his life as a photojournalist from 1959 to 1971. ”This week he is back in Wales for the exhibit of his photos at the National Library of Wales. His first visit back there since the tragedy was in June 2003 when he started setting up the exhibition, working with some of the people he had photographed as children. At the close of the exhibition in June, Rapoport will donate his photos to the library.