Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Fort Dick, CA

Fort Dick is a small unincorporated community and census-designated place in rural Del Norte County, California, about five miles north of Crescent City and around 15 miles south of the Oregon state line, on the U.S. Route 101 corridor of the Redwood Coast.

In the Tolowa language the place is called Mvn-des-chuu-dvn, and the surrounding redwood coast was the homeland of the Tolowa and Yurok peoples long before settlers arrived.

Explorer Jedediah Smith's party passed through the Fort Dick area in June 1828, camping along Elk Creek and skirting the eastern shore of Lake Earl while trading with the Tolowa.

Fort Dick Landing dates to the Civil War era and was named after a settler's fortified log house — the “fort” — and the place was briefly renamed Newburg in 1888 when the Bertsch brothers moved a shake and shingle mill there, before the old name Fort Dick was revived.

Fort Dick first appeared as a census-designated place in the 2020 census, which counted 912 residents living in 357 households, more than 81 percent of them owner-occupied.

About 11.3 percent of Fort Dick's residents were Native American in the 2020 census, one reflection of the area's deep Tolowa heritage.

Fort Dick is home to Redwood Elementary School, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in the Del Norte County Unified School District, while older students travel to Crescent City for high school.

Fort Dick has a mild warm-summer Mediterranean climate with about 72 inches of rain a year and summer high temperatures averaging only in the mid-60s Fahrenheit.

The treacherous waters offshore have claimed many ships, including the steamer Brother Jonathan, wrecked in 1865, and the tanker SS Emidio, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1941 and became the first ship sunk by Japan off America's Pacific coast in World War II.