Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Old Town Homer, AK

Homer is a city in Kenai Peninsula Borough on the shore of Kachemak Bay, on the southwest side of the Kenai Peninsula, 218 miles southwest of Anchorage; its Dena'ina name is Tuggeght.

The 2020 census counted 5,522 residents in Homer, up from 5,003 in 2010, in 2,384 households.

Homer first appeared on the 1940 census as an unincorporated village with 325 residents and formally incorporated as a city on March 31, 1964.

Homer was named for Homer Pennock, a gold mining company promoter who arrived in 1896 and built living quarters for his crew on the Homer Spit, although gold mining was never profitable in the area.

Homer is long known as the Halibut Fishing Capital of the World, is nicknamed the end of the road and the cosmic hamlet by the sea, and carries the motto Where the land ends and the sea begins.

The Homer Spit is a narrow 4.5-mile gravel bar extending into Kachemak Bay that holds the Homer Harbor, and much of the coastline and the Spit sank during the Good Friday earthquake in March 1964.

Coal was discovered in the area in the 1890s, and the Cook Inlet Coal Fields Company built a town, dock, coal mine, and railroad at Homer, with coal mining the main pillar of the economy until World War II.

Miller's Landing, an earlier settlement named for homesteader Charles Miller, was legally a separate census-designated place until Homer annexed it in 2002.

Homer co-hosted the 2006 Arctic Winter Games, and it is home to the Pratt Museum and the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center, run jointly by the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve.

The only road into Homer is the Sterling Highway.