Doug VanDine Full Interview

Geotechnical engineer Doug VanDine describes his experiences as an employee of a consulting engineering firm, a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, and as a sole practitioner engineering consultant. Drawn to geotechnical engineering by his love of math, science, and the outdoors, he worked in the western Arctic on three projects after completing his undergraduate degree at Queen's University in 1972. He returned to Queen's to earn a Master's degree that included a thesis based on the Drynoch Landslide in British Columbia, and notes that his subsequent career as a sole practitioner engineering consultant "kept coming back to landslides". He taught geotechnical engineering at Queen's for four years, developing two-week summer fieldwork projects that engaged students in the hands-on practice of the discipline. After purchasing the contents of his office at Thurber Engineering for $500, he founded VanDine Geological Engineering. His many projects include pioneering studies on debris flows that led to assessing and developing mitigation strategies for debris flows on the Squamish and Coquihalla Highways in British Columbia. He also served on the Oil and Gas Appeals Tribunal, the Forestry Appeals Commission and the Environmental Appeals Board in British Columbia, and conducted practice reviews and wrote guidelines for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC. He describes his transition from being a geotechnical design engineer to a researcher and writer of geotechnical engineering history. His first publication gave a history of the Drynoch Landslide in BC, which has been moving for over 6,000 years. He has also researched and published biographies of Robert Leggett, " a father of geotechnical engineering in Canada" and Major Leslie Charles, who located much of the Hudson Bay Railway from The Pas to Churchill Manitoba a century ago.