"There was a lady running up and down the pavement here shouting, 'the school has gone, the school has gone'."

Nearly 60 years to the day, Dave Evans can still hear the cries.

Sitting outside his home in Aberfan, he points towards the street where panic unfolded on the morning of 21 October 1966, when a collapsing coal waste tip engulfed Pantglas Junior School and nearby homes.

"It was the saddest day of my life," the 86-year-old said. "There will never be a day equal to that. Never, ever."

On that Friday morning, thousands of tonnes of water-saturated colliery waste broke away from a mountainside above Aberfan and raced down the slope towards the village below, destroying homes and engulfing the school.

A total of 144 people died, including 116 children.

Dave Evans' home was one of the few in Aberfan to have a telephone at the time of the disaster, and it's believed he made the first call to the fire service that morning.

As part of events to mark this year's anniversary, the original fire service vehicle returned to Aberfan to visit the house where Evans still lives today.

"I remember it distinctly. As if it happened yesterday," he said.

From the doorstep of the family home, he watched confusion turn rapidly to horror.

"I remember the chap who answered the phone in the fire service. I remember our conversation."

Most of all, he remembers the woman shouting desperately in the street.

"It is indelibly printed on my mind," he said.

Evans' early phone call to the fire service set in motion an emergency response that would bring firefighters, police officers, ambulance crews and rescue workers rushing towards the village.

After making the call, he headed towards the disaster zone, where the first signs were almost surreal.

The roofs of houses, swept from their foundations by the avalanche of slurry, lay stranded in the road.

"There wasn't a tile or a slate missing," he recalled. "They were perfectly intact, but they were in the middle of the road."

Among the collapsed houses he heard a voice.

"There was a young boy who was crying and shouting, so I crawled into the rubble and got his hand, and I assured him and said 'we'll get you out of here now, don't worry'."

The local GP arrived to take over. The vision of ruined houses and the devastated school was almost incomprehensible.

"It still hadn't dawned on me what had happened," he said.

"But as the morning wore on, then it became more and more apparent."

Firefighters worked alongside police officers, ambulance personnel, local residents and hundreds of miners who abandoned their shifts and rushed to help.

"If it hadn't been for the miners that day, we might have been digging there today," Evans said. "They were fantastic. They were marvellous men."

Six decades on, those memories continue to affect him.

"The 50th anniversary was harrowing, but this seems to be more so," he said. "I don't know why, but it's more so."

Evans' father had been deputy head teacher at Pantglas Junior School but had retired through ill-health a few months before the disaster.

Today, he still has a get well card signed by his father's class of children, many of whom were killed.

Just before the 60th anniversary of the disaster, Evans was reunited with a remarkable piece of that day's history.

Parked outside the same house from which he telephoned the fire brigade in 1966 was the vintage fire engine believed to have been the first emergency vehicle sent to Aberfan after his call.

The vehicle, now owned by Norfolk Fire Museum, once served at Merthyr Tydfil fire station.

Its owner, Henry Cotton, said the connection to Aberfan only emerged after detailed research involving South Wales Fire and Rescue Service.

"We didn't know its significance in its role as being the first fire engine to attend until South Wales Fire and Rescue pointed it out to us and confirmed it with call logs," he said.

For him, bringing the appliance back to Aberfan was about far more than preserving a historic vehicle.

"It is a very rare opportunity to meet people like Dave and it's probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Cotton said.

The vehicle is a reminder not simply of the tragedy itself, but of the speed with which emergency workers responded after the alarm was raised.

South Wales Fire and Rescue Service spent months helping to trace and reunite the appliance with the village ahead of the anniversary commemorations.

Beci Newton, who helped lead the project, said firefighters were keen to recognise the role Evans played on that morning.

"Dave's quickness in making that phone call ensured that the emergency services were here as quick as they possibly could be and that rescue operation could start pretty much immediately," she said.

For modern firefighters, Newton said, the story remained an important part of the service's history, while the passing decades mean there are fewer and fewer people able to give first-hand accounts of what happened in Aberfan.

"This is a story that we all have to keep telling," Newton said.

"As the people who can tell their own personal story are no longer here, we become the people that carry that story forward for them."

Dave Evans believes future generations need to understand what happened in Aberfan and the impact it had on the community.

"It is important that people are shown and told what happened," he said.