Dresden explosion 1957: Documentary at the ‘halfway point’

The documentary on the Dresden explosion of 1957 is almost done.

Documentarian Eric Philpott has already invested two and a half years into a film about one of the worst workplace tragedies in Ontario history.

“If a story of this magnitude can disappear, how are we ever going to be a society that will honour an individual life that’s lost in the workplace?” Philpott said in an interview. “I’m really hoping this is a kind of a bit of a wake up (call) for all of us that this issue is happening. It’s still happening.”

On Aug. 14, 1957, six Dutch immigrants died when the pit they were excavating caved in.

They were building a water treatment plant and pumping station for the small community of Dresden in Chatham-Kent.

Philpott’s father, Keith was a site engineer who, according to Eric, warned the company the site wasn’t safe.

“[My dad] is kind of raising the warning, like, this site is dangerous, we should get soil testing and no one’s listening to him. Then there’s a cave in, and it’s almost as if they blame him, as opposed to at least give him the recognition,” Philpott said.

Growing up Eric says his father rarely talked about the tragedy, but he did preserve all his records.

“Because we have those records, I was able to slowly piece together something for which there is otherwise no official record at all,” Philpott said.

For the last two and a half years, Philpott has tracked down the descendants of the victims, conducted interviews, and spent hours shooting video from Dresden.

“We’ve filmed almost everything that we’re going to use in the film,” he said. “This film is at that halfway point right now.”

Philpott has resumed fundraising for the documentary on his website.

Philpott estimates its going to take another $200,000 to finish the film, to be spent on editing, laying a soundtrack and polishing a 3D image of the site itself.

“We’ll use the 3D model to illustrate what the riverbank looked like in 1957, when this, you know, tragedy happened,” Philpott said. “I think that really helps, you know, understand it conceptually and also understand the danger.”

Philpott doesn’t see the documentary as a vindication for his father, but rather, a historical retelling of a serious workplace tragedy that affected countless lives.

“I feel I owe it to, above all the families of these men, you know, whose story was really lost,” Philpott said. “No one knows about this event. No experts. It’s not in any book. There’s no kind of official record of this.”

However long it takes to finish the documentary, Philpott will not quit.

Once it’s done, he would like to sell it to a Canadian broadcaster, streaming service and get into smaller film festivals.

Not for the money or the attention, he says, but rather, to keep the story of six immigrants who moved to Canada for a better life only to die on the job.

“They were building Canada in 1957. People are still building Canada today,” Philpott said. “Workers still die on the job in Canada, immigrants are still more vulnerable in these situations. [They] are disproportionately represented in fatalities.”