Humboldt blood bank marks 75 years, seeks new donors

Humboldt’s emergency care once depended on blood hauled up from Santa Rosa by bus, a system local doctors and the Eureka Elks Lodge helped replace in the early 1950s. Seventy-five years later, the Northern California Community Blood Bank is marking that fix with a sharper message for Humboldt County: local blood is still a matter of emergency readiness, and the region still needs more donors to stay self-reliant.

What began as a response to unreliable storage and waste has grown into a nonprofit 501(c)(3) that serves primarily Humboldt and Del Norte counties. The blood bank operates a fixed center on Harrison Avenue in Eureka and four bloodmobiles that travel throughout the two counties. The organization says it needs 60 to 70 donors every day to provide a safe and adequate blood supply for the patients it serves, a reminder that rural geography can make every mile between donor and hospital matter.

The pressure is not abstract. The blood bank says longtime donors are aging out, while fresh demand keeps coming in from surgeries, injuries and emergencies. Its 2022 figures show the scale of that challenge and the community response: 10,086 donors came through its doors that year, including 1,979 first-time donors. More than two-thirds of donations now happen on bloodmobiles, even as the organization says it lost a third bloodmobile in 2021 and is fundraising to replace it. In a fall 2024 newsletter, the bank said bloodmobiles had once accounted for 75% of whole-blood donations, but that share had fallen to about 58% after the loss.

That mobile network matters most when supply runs short. The bank has flagged recurring shortages of O negative and O positive blood, with O negative especially critical in emergencies because it can be given when a patient’s blood type is not yet known. In a 2025 post, the organization said a critical O-negative shortage had been driven by increased local demand. The bank’s apheresis materials also note that AB-positive and AB-negative plasma are universal plasma types, another detail that underscores how carefully each donation has to be matched to patient need.

The anniversary will be marked with a June 18 celebration that doubles as recruitment, including a Greater Eureka Chamber of Commerce mixer, tours of the blood bank and a classic car show. The goal is not just to look back on 75 years of local service, but to bring more Humboldt residents into the donor pool before another shortage tests how much medical self-reliance the county really has.