{"id":37293,"date":"2021-04-07T08:49:33","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T08:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=37293"},"modified":"2021-04-07T08:49:33","modified_gmt":"2021-04-07T08:49:33","slug":"the-complex-politics-of-managing-coal-waste-tip-stability-in-south-wales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2021\/04\/07\/the-complex-politics-of-managing-coal-waste-tip-stability-in-south-wales\/","title":{"rendered":"The complex politics of managing coal waste tip stability in South Wales"},"content":{"rendered":"

The complex politics of managing coal waste tip stability in South Wales<\/h4>\n

The valleys of South Wales have one of the most complex landslide settings in the UK<\/a>.\u00a0 It is a landscape that has a great deal of natural instability, much of it relict.\u00a0 However, many slopes continue to move, sometimes causing substantial levels of disruption<\/a>.\u00a0 On top of this is imprinted the effects of decades of coal extraction, which led to increased instability.\u00a0 In some cases existing landslides were reactivated<\/a>.\u00a0 And finally, and most significantly, poor coal waste management practises led to the creation of thousands of spoil tips, some of which had substantial stability problems. The worst example is of course the appalling 1966 Aberfan disaster<\/a>, but that case was just one of many spoil tip landslides<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Google

Google Earth image of the coal waste tips at Tylorstown in South Wales. Note the large conical tip at the top of the hill and the failed tip in the lower left corner.<\/p><\/div>\n

Coal mining has now ceased, and many of the most dangerous spoil tips have been removed.\u00a0 However, the landscape remains dotted with many legacy waste piles, often located high on the valley walls.\u00a0 These have been mostly stable in recent decades, but in February 2020 it became clear that the beast was waking from its slumbers.\u00a0 Heavy rainfall triggered a large failure in a coal spoil tip at Tylorstown<\/a>.\u00a0 And then in December a further failure occurred at Wattstown<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is now recognised that there is a major problem. There are thought to be about 2,100 spoil tips left in the valleys of South Wales.\u00a0 Around 300 of these are considered to be high risk.\u00a0 Perhaps surprisingly, only 40 of these are managed by the Coal Authority<\/a>, the governmental nod with responsibility for (amongst other things) the management of historic liability issues, including polluted water, subsidence and surface hazards associated with past mining activity.\u00a0 The remainder are owned by a range of bodies, including local authorities.\u00a0 Perhaps surprisingly, the majority are privately owned.<\/p>\n

The FT has a really good article about the complex politics that surround the management of the coal waste tip stability hazard<\/a>.\u00a0 It notes that the likely financial cost of dealing with the hazard is very substantial – the Tylorstown tip alone might cost \u00a310 million to remediate.\u00a0 The total bill might be in the order of \u00a3500 million<\/a> – and experience tells us that these costs tend to balloon once the work commences.<\/p>\n

Until recently the UK Government position has been that this is a problem for the Welsh Government, but the scale of the threat means that it is likely to be beyond its means.\u00a0 Cash strapped local authorities and private land owners will not have the resources.\u00a0 The article notes that there is a strong argument that the coal was mined in the national interest, such that the costs should be carried by the whole of the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

Strangely, the slow motion horror show that is Brexit may play a key role in how this plays out.\u00a0 In Scotland, Brexit has turbocharged the move towards independence, threatening the historic union.\u00a0 This is now spilling over to Wales, where the profile of independence is rising.\u00a0 Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister from the Conservative and Unionist Party<\/a>; the gathering momentum for independence is not a good look.\u00a0 So, the article speculates, the UK Government might have to step in to cover the costs of mitigating the spoil tip hazard as a sweetener to the electorate in Wales.<\/p>\n

Landslide hazard is often viewed as a physical process, managed through good engineering geology and high quality engineering.\u00a0 The reality is that the scale of the threat means that politics is often at least as important of engineering.\u00a0 In the case of South Wales, the complex politics might be the key that unlocks the funding needed to manage the threats posed by the coal waste tips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The complex politics of managing coal waste tip stability in South Wales<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":37296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[740],"tags":[381,144,469,299,205,30629,1162,575],"class_list":["post-37293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-costs","tag-coal","tag-europe","tag-featured","tag-mine","tag-mining","tag-tips","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}