Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Ramona, CA

Ramona is a large unincorporated town and census-designated place in the Santa Maria Valley of inland San Diego County — despite having over 21,000 people, it has no city government and is run directly by the County of San Diego.

Ramona was originally called Nuevo, and in 1886 land speculator Milton Santee's Santa Maria Land & Water Company renamed its new townsite Ramona after Helen Hunt Jackson's bestselling novel Ramona; after a naming tug-of-war with another California town, Nuevo permanently became Ramona in 1894.

Ramona's 1886 Verlaque House, possibly the first French Provincial-style home built in the western United States, now houses the Ramona Pioneer Historical Society and the Guy B. Woodward Museum, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Ramona Town Hall, built in 1894 on land donated by Milton Santee, is one of the largest and oldest adobe structures in Southern California — it hosted Ramona's first high school classes from 1894 to 1898, plus its first bank and first library, and joined the National Register in 1994.

Ramona's population was 21,468 at the 2020 census, and together with the adjoining San Diego Country Estates community the wider Ramona area is considerably larger.

Ramona has about 7,336 households averaging 3.07 people each, and about 70% of its homes are owner-occupied — a distinctly rural, horse-property community of San Diego County.

In January 2006 the Ramona Valley was designated the 162nd American Viticultural Area in the United States, recognized for its distinctive microclimate, elevation, and soils, and the valley is now dotted with boutique wineries.

Ramona sits at about 1,430 feet in the foothills of the Laguna Mountains and has an extreme inland Mediterranean climate — its airport recorded a high of 117°F in July 2018 and a low of 16°F in January 2007.

The Cedar Fire, then the largest wildfire in California history, ignited just east of Ramona on October 25, 2003, and the Witch Creek Fire started near Ramona in October 2007, together forcing some of the largest evacuations in U.S. history.

In the 1960s boxing great Archie Moore ran his 'Salt Mine' training camp at the foot of Ramona's Mt. Woodson, where both Muhammad Ali and George Foreman trained.