Hi Colin:

Thank you very very much for letting me know about Dave.  This is very sad news indeed as Dave and I knew each other and worked together for probably over 30 years.  I can’t avoid the use of the cliché that Dave was and ‘engineer’s engineer’ but he was just that in every sense.  To this day I am always asking myself “would Dave do this” or “what would Dave do here”.  The man exuded exceptional intelligence and a thought process beyond most.  Dave could always be counted upon to come up with an original idea or work around to solve a tricky problem.  What I think made Dave outstanding in his field was his understanding of his pallet of materials.   Dave didn’t simply memorize formulas and then upsize to be safe; he knew what his concrete or steel would do and how it would behave in any given situation.  He anticipated issues and more than once I’ve seen, in real life, what a forklift will do to a steel column and what would have happened had the column been sized to a minimum. 

I have many many fond memories of Dave and I always thoroughly enjoyed getting together to go over drawings.  He’d be there with headphones on listening to classical music pouring over plans.  I recall back in the J. D. Lee days on Sherwood Drive.   I did some drawings for Dave in the development of a bicycle ramp to go up beside some concrete stairs on the Robinson Street bridge in Niagara Falls.  And there was a fish ladder on a dam somewhere.  Wow, that drove us both nuts….this was long before Autocad when everything had to be calculated manually and dimensioned.  How did we ever do it?   I used to laugh as Dave had many years on me and I have still to totally embrace technology but Dave had his trusty HP calculator which he frequently programmed, himself, to do repetitive calculations.  Remarkable.  He’d show me that and then grin at how well it worked and how much time it saved him.   You know the grin/smile I’m talking about.

Dave’s integrity and honesty were second to none.  Dave always spoke highly and fondly of his family and we always shared figure skating stories about his daughters and mine.

It was an honour to have known Dave and please accept my sincere sympathy.

Don Plumstead.