Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Rock Island, WA

Rock Island is a small city in Douglas County on the east bank of the Columbia River, part of the Wenatchee–East Wenatchee metropolitan area about seven miles downriver from Wenatchee.

The site was long used by Native American tribes for fishing and crossing the Columbia at the Rock Island Rapids, and a trading post operated there in the early 1860s.

James E. Keane, the first permanent settler, arrived in 1887 and platted a townsite called Hammond; when the Great Northern Railway's plans shifted, he moved the townsite and renamed it Rock Island for the rocky islands in the river.

Rock Island boomed in 1891–1893 as crews built the Great Northern's first steel bridge across the Columbia, then faded once the bridge was finished and the railroad workers left.

The city boomed a second time in 1930, when Puget Sound Power and Light began building Rock Island Dam — the first dam on the Columbia River — just below the rapids.

Rock Island was officially incorporated on November 3, 1930, in the middle of dam construction, with a population of 421; the dam's first generators began producing power in 1931.

Many Native American pictographs were destroyed by the dam's construction, though a small saved sampling is preserved at the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center.

A silicon smelter operated in Rock Island from World War II until it closed in 1999.

The 2020 census counted 1,279 people in Rock Island living in 414 households — a jump of more than 60% from 788 residents in 2010.

About 52.2% of Rock Island's residents identified as Hispanic or Latino in the 2020 census, and children attend schools in the Eastmont School District.