Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Kahlotus, WA

Kahlotus is a small incorporated city in Franklin County, home to 147 people in 59 households at the 2020 census.

The town was first platted in 1902 by Hans Harder and called Hardersburg; it was later renamed Kahlotus, a name traced to the Sahaptin place name /kalúːt'as/, also said to mean "hole in the ground" — which survives as the city's nickname — and possibly borrowed from a Palouse chief who signed the Yakima Treaty of 1855.

The first organized settlement at Kahlotus was made around 1880 by German immigrants brought in by the railroads, and the platting coincided with restored rail service on the line across the north end of town.

Kahlotus was officially incorporated on May 31, 1907, and boomed during railroad construction, when local legend holds that nearly 20 saloons, a bank, a newspaper, and brothels sprang up to serve the rail crews; the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway soon built a second line along the south shore of Kahlotus Lake, tunneling through the basalt cliffs.

Completion of the Lower Monumental Dam on the Snake River in 1969 flooded the ancient Marmes Rockshelter but made the river navigable for grain barges, and the railroads through town were later abandoned; their rights-of-way became part of the Columbia Plateau Trail State Park.

The city sits on the floor of Washtucna Coulee at the junction of three state highways — State Route 21 ends here on its run from the Canadian border, State Route 260 follows the coulee through town, and State Route 263 runs south through Devils Canyon to Lower Monumental Dam.

Kahlotus Lake, a spring-fed alkaline lake just east of town that was once popular for bass and crappie fishing, shrank rapidly through the 1990s, and by 2000 only a small marsh remained at the far end of its bed.

Dryland wheat and cattle farming dominate the local economy — the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project does not deliver water to Kahlotus — and some residents work at Lower Monumental Dam, the Lyons Ferry Fish Hatchery, or the Coyote Ridge corrections facility.

Kahlotus's census count spiked to 308 in 1970, in the era of dam construction on the Snake River, before falling back through the following decades.

The Kahlotus School District has never had a graduating class larger than 12 students — in 1988 and 1991 — and its senior classes of 2013 and 2014 had just three graduates each.