Biohazard Cleanup Near Wasatch Provo, UT

Provo is a city in and the county seat of Utah County, Utah, sitting on the eastern bank of Utah Lake in Utah Valley about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City along the Wasatch Front.

Provo had a population of 115,162 at the 2020 census, making it the fourth-most-populous city in Utah and the most populous city in the state outside the Salt Lake City metropolitan area.

A Census Bureau 2020-2024 survey estimate put Provo at about 34,022 households, with an average of about 3.02 persons per household.

Provo was founded in 1849, when 33 Mormon families from Salt Lake City established Fort Utah, and it was incorporated in April 1850 and renamed for Étienne Provost, an early French-Canadian trapper who had arrived in the region in 1825.

The area was originally called Timpanogas, a Numic word perhaps meaning rock river, and it was the homeland of the Timpanogos people before Spanish Franciscan missionary-explorer Silvestre Vélez de Escalante visited in 1776.

Provo is home to Brigham Young University, a private university operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to that church's largest Missionary Training Center.

Provo's Peaks Ice Arena was a venue for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and the city is a focus area for technology development in Utah, with several billion-dollar startups.

Provo was nicknamed the Garden City for its many fruit orchards and gardens, and a railroad reached the city in 1872, the same year the Provo Woolen Mills opened as the city's first large factory.

The city covers about 44.2 square miles, of which about 2.5 square miles are water, and it sits at an elevation of about 4,551 feet beneath Y Mountain, whose hillside carries a large whitewashed concrete letter Y built in the early 20th century to commemorate Brigham Young University.

Provo is the principal city of the Provo-Orem-Lehi metropolitan area, which had a population of 671,185 at the 2020 census, anchoring Utah's second-largest metropolitan area after Salt Lake City.