Recognising one of our industry’s best

EVERY SO OFTEN, SOMEONE COMES INTO YOUR LIFE WHO CHANGES YOU FOR THE BETTER. FOR ME, THAT WAS DAVE SINGLE.

have secondary guarding fitted. When he retired from JLG, he reached out to his contacts for help because he wanted to create a Global Incident Report that could be used to gather the relevant information. His contacts, including me, responded to help him bring the report to life. I’ve used this document on a number of occasions. He was also invaluable in bringing to life other key documents that are now standard across our industry:

• Walking with Scissorlifts

• Policy on Fall Arrest

• Working Over Water.

Dave was that person who if you asked him the time, he would tell you how the watch worked. When I called him asking for help to write my first technical document, he made the time to visit and taught me how to write technical documents. I have now written many. For me, Dave was a bright star, one to follow and learn from and I am a better person for having been mentored by him.

I first met Dave as a service tech at Snorkel training where he was the facilitator. I was wowed by the information he shared and the quality of the technical documents he had personally created. His mantra was “teach a man to fish and feed him for life”.

Dave was relentless in his pursuit of safety. He was always available to share his knowledge and ideas for continuous improvements to our industry but was also willing to take constructive feedback and follow it through to achieve the right result. If he saw something that wasn’t safe, he would stop and call it out. He told a story about where he witnessed an unsafe practice when he was out shopping. He spoke to the person calmly about the danger they were in, only to be assaulted and abused. Yet this did not stop Dave and his determination and commitment to safety only grew stronger.

Dave worked with JLG Engineering to make secondary guarding crush protection a reality. Today, there’s not a boom lift sold in Australia that does not

In his spare time after he retired, he reached out to his contacts to help those who were less fortunate. On one occasion, a local school needed laptops for their students as their families could not afford them. Through his network of contacts, used laptops were donated, refurbished and provided to the students.

At the HIRE23 Excellence Awards and Gala Dinner in May, I had the privilege, along with Pete Davis and Tim Nuttall, to posthumously present the EWPA Award – the Dave Single Award — to its namesake in recognition of his services to the Access industry. Dave’s son Neil accepted the award in honour of his late father.

I know I speak for many people when I say he is sadly missed but fondly remembered. His legacy is a safer access industry. There’s also a generation in our industry who knew Dave as an industry icon, a colleague, a peer and a friend, and who will never forget the passion he had for keeping people safe in our industry.