A LIFE STORY Terrace tunnel engineer left enduring imprint
Alan Thomas Proffitt, engineer: b Napier July 26, 1923; m Beatrice Margaret (Peggy) Hay December 22, 1950 Waimate, South Canterbury, 3d, 2s; d January 18, 2014, aged 90.
ALAN PROFFITT’S biggest legacy to the people of Wellington was perhaps the roles he played as the engineer in charge of the Terrace tunnel and Wellington urban motorway construction projects.
As the Ministry of Works District Civil Engineer in Wellington in the 1970s he had oversight of the design and construction of the Wellington urban motorway and Terrace tunnel construction projects.
Indeed, the Terrace tunnel is viewed by many Wellingtonians as the sentinel State Highway 1 gateway to the city.
In a retirement interview, Mr Proffitt described his role in overseeing the Terrace tunnel project, opened in 1978, as being the biggest single contract he had handled in his 42 years with the MoW.
His overall urban motorway project oversight role, too, undertaken in conjunction with the tunnel project, was not an easy one.
It saw Mr Proffitt having to deal with the public fallout from bereaved families whose loved ones had buried their dead in the Bolton Street Cemetery for over a century.
He quietly, methodically and humanely worked alongside cabinet ministers, National Roads Board and Wellington City Council personnel to complete the project.
Mr Proffitt was born in Napier and survived the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake while his family lived there.
His father was a plumber who, before going on to purchase his own Hawke’s Bay service station, installed pumps and tanks at petrol stations up and down the North Island’s East Coast.
Mr Proffitt completed his secondary education as a boarder at Napier Boys High School in 1940.
He joined the Public Works Department – which became the Ministry of Works in 1948 and the Ministry of Works and Development in 1974 – in 1941 as a draughting cadet.
In World War II he served initially with the Army Engineers on home service and later, after he had persuaded his mother to allow him to join the Air Force, with the RNZAF as a pilot. He was stationed on Bougainville and Guadalcanal.
Whilst on active service in the Pacific he flew Corsair fighters and Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers.
There was high drama on one occasion when a Corsair he was flying crash-landed at a Bougainville airfield after he returned from a mission.
The incident was officially recorded in RNZAF records as a heavy landing.
Mr Proffitt, who was uninjured in the landing and whose plane ended up in a ditch on the side of the runway, disputed the official version all his life.
He was adamant that the brakes on one side of his aircraft had seized up upon landing.
The ‘‘heavy landing,’’ according to him, resulted from a partially seized brake on one side of the undercarriage causing the plane to swing on landing and ‘‘ground loop’’ (flip).
According to Mr Proffitt, the need to use the brakes to swing the aircraft from side to side during taxiing before takeoff – so as pilots could see past the long, high nose of the Corsair – meant the disc brakes became very hot and sometimes distorted.
This, he contended, was the reason his aircraft had crash landed at the end of his ill-fated flight.
Following his active service with the RNZAF in the Pacific, he returned to his Public Works Department duties as a draughtsman in Napier.
In 1946 he took up a rehabilitation bursary to study civil engineering at Canterbury University.
While on a blind date at the university’s Arts Ball, he met his wife to be, fine arts student Peggy Hay, who had been raised on a South Canterbury farm.
He completed his engineering studies at the end of 1949.
He was appointed to the (Public Works) department’s Housing Construction branch in Napier where he was effectively Housing Engineer for East Cape to Eketahuna.
In 1950 he was transferred to Wellington, where he was a design engineer, working on South Island power schemes.
He moved from design to construction when his then family of four moved to Mangakino on the Waikato River in March 1954.
While based in Mangakino he was involved in overseeing quality control on construction work at the Maraetai, Whakamaru, Atiamuri, Ohakuri and Aratiatia power projects.
From their pleasant existence on the western shores of Lake Maraetai on the Waikato River at Mangakino, the family shifted to Dunedin where he oversaw roading projects.
The Proffitts next moved to Wellington in 1965, where he worked as a pavement design engineer. Life at head office was too political for his liking, and he opted to take a sideways shift to a district civil engineering job in the Wellington region.
He completed his public service career in July 1983 after replacing Alan Peart as the Wellington Region’s District Commissioner.
In early retirement, while living in Tawa, he was mindful that both his parents had died at 72.. Once he reached the age of 72 himself, he regarded the remaining years of his life as very much a bonus.
Outside of his work he was a dedicated family man and keen gardener who also served for a while as president of the Tawa College PTA.
In 1986 he was elected to the Tawa Borough Council, where he served as chairman of the works committee for three years.
Mr Proffitt spent most of his professional life working as a public service engineer. He believed in public service and was very much opposed to state owned asset sales, particularly in the energy sector.
He was a product of his generation, an engineer who did things correctly and thoroughly.