Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Taylorsville, UT

Taylorsville is a city in Salt Lake County, Utah, in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley, and it had a population of 60,448 at the 2020 census, up from 58,652 in 2010.

The city was incorporated on July 1, 1996, from the Taylorsville-Bennion census-designated place and portions of the Kearns metro township, after voters approved incorporation with over 70 percent support in September 1995.

Taylorsville officially became a city during the centennial anniversary of Utah's statehood in 1996, and it is named for John Taylor.

The first Mormon pioneer settlers, Joseph and Susanna Harker, built a log cabin on the west side of the Jordan River in November 1848, on what was then called the Church Farm.

The tiny settlement, the first over Jordan, was called Harker's Settlement, and its families dug ditches to move water from the Jordan River onto the land on the west side.

In 1853 and 1854, during the Walker War, settlers built a 2-acre adobe fort called the English Fort just north of the North Jordan Burying Ground, which locals nicknamed Fort Hardscrabble.

The land under Taylorsville sits on more than a kilometer of unconsolidated rock, sand, and clay, and the inactive Taylorsville Fault has been traced down the center of the Salt Lake Valley.

A broad, east-west ridge called Bennion Hill rises perhaps 150 feet above the surrounding area at the eastern end of a wide ridge that rises toward Farnsworth Peak in the Oquirrh Mountains.

Lake Bonneville shaped the area's topography and deposited lake bottom clay and sand, leaving the soil alkaline as the lake dried up over the past 14,000 years.

Taylorsville covers about 10.85 square miles at an elevation of about 4,295 feet, and it sits adjacent to Interstate 215 and Bangerter Highway.