Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Needles, CA

Needles was founded in May 1883 as a railroad town, when the railroad first crossed the Colorado River from Arizona at this point on its way to the Pacific.

Needles is named for "The Needles," a group of sharp, needle-like rock pinnacles rising 1,200 to 1,600 feet across the Colorado River in Mohave County, Arizona.

Needles was officially incorporated on October 30, 1913, making it one of the oldest cities in San Bernardino County.

After the original depot burned down, it was replaced in 1908 by the El Garces, a grand Harvey House hotel and train depot named for the Spanish missionary-explorer Father Francisco Garcés.

Needles was a major stop on U.S. Route 66 from the 1920s through the 1960s, and for Dust Bowl families fleeing the Midwest in the 1930s it was the first town that marked their arrival in California — a journey later immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Needles bills itself as the "Eastern Gateway to California" and serves as a gateway to the Mojave National Preserve.

Needles is one of the hottest cities in the United States — on August 13, 2012, it set a world record when rain fell while the air temperature was 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Needles had a population of 4,931 at the 2020 census, living in roughly 2,000 households that average only about 2.4 people each, with some 2,743 housing units in the city.

Long before the railroad, the Mojave Valley was home to the Mojave people for thousands of years, and many of their descendants still live in the area today as members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe.

Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, lived in Needles as a boy.