Michel Huneault arrived at Lac-Mégantic for the first time twenty hours after the explosion, and continued visiting the community afterwards. The impressions gathered through research and through intimate discussions with locals loomed over him while he recorded the calm eeriness of a town where everything had changed one night at a quarter past one.

Through the seasons and the aftershocks he became close friends with many of the townspeople, sharing the lonely ebb and flow of their emotions — pain, anger, hopes for healing and peace of mind — and that complicity soon echoed through the work, which became an active fragment of an evolving collective memory. A train carrying nearly eight million litres of shale oil exploded in the town centre; one year after her death, a mother begins to speak of a daughter who had been working at the café and was the first person reported missing.