Dave Ratliff was taking water samples tests in a creek near the Iowa River in 2005 when he stepped in a hole, shattering his left heel.
“They told me I’d never walk again,” he said. “I’m very proud I got up and was back in the creek in 105 days.”
Ratliff is a project leader with the Johnson and Iowa County Watershed Coalition, a volunteer organization that has conducted over 2,200 streamside measurements and collected over 500 samples for laboratory analyses. The group’s work is responsible for raising awareness of water quality issues statewide.
An avid fly-fisherman, Ratliff’s interest in natural resources began in Boulder, Colo., where he worked at Ball Brothers Research Corp. In the early 1970s he began studying the lakes, rivers and streams of Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma.
After moving to Iowa, he worked with the United States Geological Survey. He started K.D. Engineering, an Iowa City computer services company, in 1976.
“As a fly-fisherman you understand your feelings toward the water,” he said. “A good flyfisherman will learn about the bugs that live in the water; where they live determines where the fish are going to be. That is the same stuff I study in the creeks. I’m there, but just without a fly rod.”
In 1999, Ratliff was in the first class to be trained under the Iowa Department of Natural Resources volunteer water quality monitoring program IOWATER. “I go out just about every weekend, some place,” he said.
He has organized teaching demonstrations for water monitoring, focusing on local school and youth groups.
“Hopefully, when I’m dead and gone people will remember me as an outreach type of guy, getting people down to the water, teaching them about the water,” he said.
Getting down to the water is not easy for Ratliff. After his accident, he had to learn to walk again. “I’m not very good on my feet,” he said. “Fishing kind of went on the back burner.”
But Ratliff’s love of fly-fishing endures. Last year, on a water-testing project in Decorah, he said, “I grabbed hold of the fly rod and it came back real fast.”
— John Goodlove