Forgotten disaster
New film will honour the lives of six Dutch immigrants buried alive in 1957 at a construction site – still one of Ontario’s worst workplace tragedies.
It was tobacco harvesting time and the days were long, so the Hovius family was in bed early. At 9 p.m. they were startled awake by a loud knocking. It was the driver for Keillor Construction. He told them there had been an accident in Dresden, where their father, Enne, and their oldest brother, Wiebrand, were working. The driver then left as quickly as he had come.
Right away, Wiebrigje Hovius called Rinze Poortinga, a family friend, who hurried over with his adult son John. Leaving John with the Hovius children, the two of them set out for Dresden.
With a growing sense of panic, the Hovius children gathered around the radio where they soon learned the worst: an excavation in Dresden had collapsed, killing the workers. It was like the floor fell out from under them.
In the Oldewening home the phone rang. When Elsie answered, the man on the other end of the line told her to get a chair. She knew immediately what he was going to say.
Metje Bremer had been out with her children, shopping for furniture for her daughter Jane and new son-in-law, Dave. When they got home there was a large group of people waiting outside their home. Her husband Jan was part of the work crew in Dresden, and when she saw the crowd, she knew something terrible had happened.
When Chris Drenth heard the news, he drove to his mother Harmke’s house in Aylmer, arriving around midnight, where she and his younger siblings were all awake.
In Byron, Margaretha Ryksen rushed over to her neighbours, who had a TV. Watching the news on CFPL London she heard that five men had lost their lives. “Only five” she thought. Her husband, Dirk, was the foreman of the crew in Dresden. If only five had died, she hoped that Dirk was not one of them.
Unfortunately, the newscast was wrong: Six men had died, and Dirk Ryksen’s body was one of the first three recovered, sometime after midnight.
Tragedy during construction
On August 14, 1957 there was a cave-in during the construction of a pumping station in the small town of Dresden, Ontario. Six workers, all recent Dutch immigrants, were buried alive when one wall of the 35-foot-deep pit they were working in collapsed. At the time, it was the worst workplace tragedy in Ontario’s history (and it still ranks second in terms of fatalities). The Dresden disaster was covered in the news across Canada and even in the Netherlands. The cave-in happened at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. The last body, that of Hendrik Drenth, was not recovered until Friday morning, 38 hours later.
On Friday, August 16, Chatham Crown Attorney Black Edwards ordered an inquest and the following Monday, Dresden police chief Alvin Watson announced an investigation. On September 12, a coroner’s inquest was held in Dresden; the deaths were ruled “accidental.” The following January, the Town of Dresden, somewhat reluctantly, voted to press charges against Keillor Construction, and on March 7, after a quick trial, contractor Alvin Keillor was acquitted.
With that, the story of the Dresden tragedy was concluded. It was mentioned in a 1969 government document about water resources management, and in two or three newspaper articles since, otherwise, it’s as if this disaster never happened. Only the families of the six men have made efforts to honour their memory. In 2002, they persuaded the now amalgamated town council for Chatham Kent to let them place a memorial stone on the site Dresden. It’s small and, unless you know where to look, you might not find it.
Precarious conditions
So how do I know any of this? My late father, Keith Philpott, was the site engineer for that construction project. My mother told me he’d been concerned about the excavation, but the contractor didn’t listen. When I first searched for information on this tragedy, I found nothing, but then my mother found my father’s diaries, photos, and other documents from Dresden, laying out the whole story in painful detail.
In 1957, Dresden was one of the first municipalities in Ontario to receive financing from the newly formed Ontario Water Resources Commission. Ontario’s towns and cities had, until then, relied on well water, but populations and industry were growing fast in the 1950s and aquifers couldn’t keep up. The Dresden waterworks were designed by Canadian British Engineering Consultants in Toronto, who sent a junior associate (my father) to Dresden to serve as site engineer.
The waterworks would consist of three structures, a pumping station beside the river, a filtration house, and a water treatment plant. The pumping station was the first to be built. This involved digging a pit 35 feet deep, so that the foundation was about 8 feet below water level.
The excavation was delayed several times by small cave-ins. No one was hurt, but my father was concerned and spoke with the foreman, Dirk Ryksen, and the contractor, Alvin Keillor, about getting soil testing done. A “slip circle analysis” would have shown them that the varved sand and clay was inherently unstable and therefore extremely dangerous – but the test was never done.
Legislation governing this type of work had been enacted in 1954. The “Trench Excavators Protection Act” required that contractors arrange for an inspection of the excavation before men would be allowed to work in it. If that had happened, the inspector would undoubtably have required shoring to reinforce the sides of the pit and protect the workers. Unfortunately, there was no inspection.
The workers lived in and around Aylmer, where they all attended the Christian Reformed Church. Dirk Ryksen, the foreman, lived in Byron (now part of London) where he attended the Christian Reformed Church (now called the Talbot Street Church), but he, too had started out in the Aylmer area. All of them had emigrated from the Netherlands that decade. All had been obliged to work for farmers for the first year in Canada. Several of them had been poorly treated by their farmer sponsors and had struggled to find steady work.
Their hands built our churches
Economic precarity did not prevent these families from playing an active role in their church. Jan Bremer was a Deacon and Jan Oldewening was an Elder. One of the congregation’s first priorities had been the building of a Christian school for their children. Both Jan Oldewening and Dirk Ryksen served on the Building Committee. Oldewening, a skilled tradesman and draughtsman, designed the first school building and later helped build it.
Engagement in church life was not limited to the elders in these families. Wiebrand Hovius was a beloved and admired leader at the young people’s group which met weekly at the church. Several of his friends kept a photo of Wiebrand in their wallet for the rest of their lives.
Working for Keillor Construction was a step up for most of the men. They had all worked together on the highway 73 overpass over the new 401 highway before moving to the Dresden project. Because Dresden was about 120 kilometers away, they stayed there during the week, returning to their families on the weekend.
On that last weekend home, at least five of the men spoke with their wives or families about the job. They knew they’d have to go down into that pit when they returned, and they weren’t looking forward to it. Enne Hovius told his wife that “it’s dangerous, but it’s a job. If anything happens, you have John.” John, who was just 13 at the time, overheard the comment.
While the community at large may have been quick to forget the Dresden tragedy, the Church did not. The Christian Reformed Church communities in Aylmer and London rallied to help the families, initiating a fundraising drive with congregations across the continent. Through these efforts, the CRC was able to provide each of the widows with $3,200 to help them secure or pay down their mortgages.
To a very real degree, we are our stories. What we know about our community and our shared history informs our sense of ourselves and makes us richer. To put it plainly: we can’t learn from something if we don’t know about it in the first place. I am now working on a documentary film about the Dresden tragedy in order to save this story and honour the memories of those who were lost.
