Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Cannon Beach, OR

Cannon Beach is a city in Clatsop County on the northern Oregon coast, and it is a popular tourist destination famous for Haystack Rock, a 235-foot sea stack that juts out along the coast.

Cannon Beach had a population of 1,489 at the 2020 census, with 705 households counted in the 2020 census, down from 1,690 in 2010.

In 2013, National Geographic listed Cannon Beach as one of the world's 100 most beautiful places, and Haystack Rock is protected as part of Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, with events barred within 100 feet of the rock.

Cannon Beach and its surrounding coast were previously settled by the Tillamook people, and William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition journeyed there in early 1805 while the expedition wintered at Fort Clatsop about 20 miles to the north.

In January 1806, Clark and several companions, including Sacagawea, completed a three-day journey to the site of a beached whale near the mouth of Ecola Creek and bartered with the Tillamook for 300 pounds of blubber and some whale oil.

Clark applied the name Ekoli to the creek now spelled Ecola, a Chinook Jargon word for whale, and early settlers later renamed the creek Elk Creek before the community took the name Cannon Beach.

In 1846, a carronade, a short naval cannon from the U.S. Navy schooner Shark, washed ashore just north of Arch Cape after the schooner sank trying to cross the Columbia Bar, and the cannon, rediscovered in 1898, inspired the community's name change in 1922.

Cannon Beach was incorporated in 1956, and the original cannon is now housed in the city's museum, with a replica displayed alongside U.S. Route 101.

A tsunami generated by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake inundated parts of Cannon Beach and washed away the highway bridge on the north side of the city, and the isolated city responded by holding a sand castle contest that still continues annually every June.

Cannon Beach also hosts an annual Fourth of July parade featuring a military flyover and a Lawn Chair Brigade, a Spring Unveiling arts festival on the first Sunday in May, and a late-fall Stormy Weather Arts Festival in November.