The debris field identifies the devastated area of the 1917 north end Halifax and Dartmouth, including neighbourhoods and settlements such as Richmond, north Dartmouth and Turtle Grove, seen through the lens of memory. This website builds on the core themes and stories emerging from the Explosion of 1917, showing how they resonate within the here and the now of Halifax 100 years later. The website project, Into The Debris Fields: The Halifax Explosion, documents two complementary expressions of today’s Halifax Explosion: a Commemorative Marker program and Drifts, an interactive mobile app.

Together, they illustrate the powerful dynamics of historical and personal reflection, and active research and public engagement. Visiting the markers and interacting with the app will allow you to experience how one human-made disaster continues to echo across time and space in extraordinary community-based connections. Here, you can reflect on your own ties to the events and stories of the Explosion, and to this city and its people.

Created with the help of over 80 collaborators and hundreds of participants, these choreographed interactive walks offer up reflections, images, videos, and other ephemeral traces that we see, hear, smell, taste and feel around us in our urban environment. Many of these urban spaces are overlooked, taken for granted, or disregarded; walking in the debris field makes us more aware of how we shape the urban space around us, and how it shapes us. Drifts demonstrates how the past and present haunt the future. All the routes on the app are simply suggestions, so feel free to wander and explore within a single drift, or from one drift to another. Walk your own path.

Stay safe in the debris field.