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

Soap Lake is a small city in Grant County, Washington, on the shore of the mineral lake of the same name, and it was officially incorporated on June 9, 1919.

The lake is a rare meromictic soda lake formed by the Ice Age Missoula Floods at the foot of the Grand Coulee — one of only about 11 meromictic lakes in the United States, whose two layers of water have not mixed in thousands of years.

Soap Lake's water contains 23 different minerals and has the highest diverse mineral content of any body of water in the world, giving it a slick, soapy feel and a natural foam that inspired its name.

Long believed to have healing properties, the lake drew visitors from around the world in the early 1900s, when sanitariums, hotels, and bathhouses lined its shore and overflow guests slept in tents or under their cars.

In 1933 the Veterans Administration sent nine veterans to Soap Lake for treatment of Buerger's disease, and McKay Hospital, completed in November 1938, served for years as a research center studying the lake water's therapeutic effects.

The 2020 census counted 1,691 residents in the city of Soap Lake, living in 801 households.

Soap Lake is an older community: the median age in 2020 was 52.5 years, and nearly 30% of residents were 65 or older.

The city sits in a desert at the south end of the Lower Grand Coulee along State Route 17, the Coulee Corridor National Scenic Byway, receiving nine inches or less of rain a year and about 320 days of sun.

Tourism dwindled during the Great Depression drought, but the building of Grand Coulee Dam and its irrigation canals brought new life to the area in the 1940s and 1950s.

The city has promoted a 52,000-pound, 60-foot-tall lava lamp — once a Target advertisement in New York's Times Square — as a future roadside attraction, an effort profiled in the 2010 documentary film "World's Largest."