Monday Mourning ~ Dolgarrog Disaster

In Loving Memory of

John Stanley Taylor

1 Machno Terrace, Dolgarrog

Aged 29 years

also of

Dorothy Buddug

his wife

Aged 24 years

and

Sylvia Doris

their daughter

Aged 17 months

who lost their lives in the

Dolgarrog Disaster on

November 2nd 1925

The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away

Blessed be the name of the Lord

On the night of the 2nd of November 1925, the failure of two dams caused a flood that swamped the village of Dolgarrog, killing 16 people. Many more villagers could have been killed had they not been in the local theatre watching a film that night.

The disaster was started by the failure of the Eigiau Dam, a gravity dam owned by the Aluminium Corporation.

The water released from the reservoir flooded downstream, and overtopped the Coedty Dam, an embankment dam. This dam also subsequently failed, releasing the huge volume of water that flooded Dolgarrog.

The disaster at Dolgarrog led the British parliament to pass the Reservoirs ~ Safety Provisions ~ Act in 1930 that introduced laws on the safety of reservoirs. This has since been updated, and the current one is the Reservoirs Act, 1975.

In 2004 a £60,000 memorial trail was created, explaining the tragic story to walkers. The trail takes visitors to where the boulders from the damaged dam reside. The project was opened by the last survivor of the dam disaster, Fred Brown, who on that night lost his mother and his younger sister.

Click the bold type link below to see archive footage of the disaster

Film of Dolgarrog Disaster