24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Herlong, CA

Herlong is a census-designated place in Lassen County, in the Honey Lake Valley at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, roughly 70 miles north of Reno, Nevada, and about 45 miles south of Susanville, the county seat.

Herlong was built almost overnight in 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to house civilian workers supporting the new Sierra Army Depot, an ammunition storage facility deliberately sited in a dry, isolated inland area where it would be safe from Japanese attack.

The town was named for Captain Henry W. Herlong, the first United States Army ordnance officer to die in World War II; for about five days after its founding, postal stamps, money orders and equipment mistakenly spelled the name 'Hurlong' before the error was caught.

Herlong's population peaked at about 5,000 in the 1950s, when the government-built town had some 40 business establishments, churches, schools, a library, a weekly newspaper, a hospital and a movie theater.

Rows of concrete ammunition-storage 'igloos' at Sierra Army Depot stretch for miles across the sagebrush plain by Honey Lake; about $20 million was approved in 1942 to build the depot on roughly 25,000 acres with some 1,000 igloos planned.

Sierra Army Depot still employs approximately 1,200 U.S. Army civilian employees and serves as the Army's End of First Life Center and its CONUS-based Army Prepositioned Stock site, and the Army describes it as its largest supply support activity.

The Federal Correctional Institution, Herlong, a medium-security federal prison for men with an adjacent minimum-security camp, opened near the community in 2007; it is one of three prisons located in Lassen County.

Herlong had just 237 residents at the 2020 census, down from 298 in 2010, living in 112 households.

Reflecting its depot-housing roots, nearly 79% of Herlong's occupied homes were rented in 2020 and only about 21% were owner-occupied.

Herlong sits at 4,114 feet of elevation and has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate with harsh winters; its recorded temperature extremes run from -31 degrees F to 111 degrees F.