Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Chowchilla, CA

Chowchilla is a city in Madera County in California's San Joaquin Valley, located about 16 miles northwest of the county seat of Madera at an elevation of about 240 feet.

The name Chowchilla is an anglicized form of the Yokuts word 'chaushila.'

Chowchilla's first post office opened in 1912, and the city was officially incorporated on February 7, 1923.

Chowchilla had a population of 19,039 at the 2020 census, up from 18,720 in 2010, spread across roughly 4,161 households.

In July 1976, Chowchilla was the scene of the largest kidnapping in United States history, when three armed men hijacked a school bus and abducted 26 children along with their driver, Ed Ray.

The kidnapped children were buried alive in a moving van inside a rock quarry in Livermore, but they dug their way out after about 16 hours and every one of them survived.

Chowchilla is home to the Central California Women's Facility, which opened in October 1990 and is the largest women's correctional facility in California.

The Central California Women's Facility also holds California's only death row for women.

Next door stands Valley State Prison, which opened in 1995 as a women's prison before being converted into a men's facility in the early 2010s.

Just south of Chowchilla at Fairmead, workers expanding a landfill in 1993 uncovered a Columbian mammoth tusk, the first of more than 15,000 fossils found at one of the largest Middle Pleistocene fossil deposits in North America.