Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Moses Lake, WA

Moses Lake is a city in Grant County and the most populous city in the county, anchoring the Moses Lake Micropolitan Area, which covers all of Grant County.

The lake and city are named for Chief Moses, leader of the Sinkiuse people from 1859 to 1899, while the area's Native name was Houaph, meaning "willow."

The settlement was founded in 1911 under the name Neppel, after a town in Germany where one of the original settlers had lived, and it was incorporated and renamed Moses Lake on September 15, 1938, when its population was only about 302 people.

Growth was explosive after mid-century: the city grew from 326 residents in 1940 to 2,679 in 1950, and the 2020 census counted 25,146 residents in 9,564 households.

Moses Lake itself, the largest natural body of fresh water in Grant County, stretches over 18 miles in three main arms, covers about 6,500 acres, and has more than 120 miles of shoreline, with Potholes Reservoir and the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge to the south.

Moses Lake Army Air Base was activated in 1942 to train World War II pilots on aircraft including the P-38 Lightning and B-17 Flying Fortress, and it reopened in 1948 as Larson Air Force Base, where Boeing tested the B-47 Stratojet and B-50 Superfortress.

The old air base is now Grant County International Airport, a 4,700-acre facility with a 13,500-foot main runway that ranks among the largest airports in the United States and is used by Boeing, the U.S. military, and NASA for heavy jet testing and training.

Japan Airlines trained its pilots at Moses Lake from 1968 until 2009 because Japanese airports lacked runway space for jumbo-jet touch-and-go practice.

Irrigation water from the Columbia Basin Project, pumped from Grand Coulee Dam, reached the area in 1955 and transformed the surrounding desert into farmland growing potatoes, corn, onions, carrots, and sugar beets.

Modern Moses Lake has become a manufacturing center, home to REC Silicon, one of the world's largest makers of polysilicon for solar panels, and to an SGL Group carbon-fiber plant built to supply material for BMW electric cars.