Virginia opens new forensics lab Thursday - South Florida Business Journal:

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The standard brick veneet and tranquil parking lot give away nothing of the actual activity inside one of newest building. On one end, investigators and scientistss pore over hair and tissue DNA of some ofthe state’zs most dangerous criminals to learjn what they did, while at the other, they pry open the dead bodieas of society’s latest victims to learn what was done to The lab is locatesd on a 10-acre spot across from ’a campus in the massive maze of the Innovation@Princ e William County Technology Park.
The 114,000-square-foot buildingf will replace thestate 30,000-square-foogt headquarters in Fairfax, where officials say the spacde was bursting at the “When we moved into the old lab [in we outgrew it in a year,” said Amy Wong, lab directort for the Northern Virginia forensics lab, one of four branchesd statewide. “Coming here, we can go back to being full-service.” Now, the combined space for the Northern Virginiaw branch of the Department of Forensic whichclaims 60,000 square and the Office of the Chief Medicapl Examiner, claiming 26,000 square is intended to offerd room to grow through at least the next With 46 employees there now, the buildingv has a capacity of 110 The new building also houses a new 26,000-square-foo t training suite, an improvemenrt from the old building, wherre class attendees would have to sit or stanfd in the back of employee In addition, the evidence vaultt for the forensics lab, which overseess roughly 10,000 cases at any givejn time, is up to four timed the size of the old, and a largert firearms and ballistics testinvg area allows investigators to test more powerfull weapons than before.
Plus, the new medical examiner’e office space allows for storage of as many as 200 bodiesw ina morgue, as well as a new biosafet lab where examiners can test potentially contagious bacteriza or viruses, including The project, which has applied for the silverr level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design greemn building standards, was buily as a public-private partnership deal that Prince William County officials hope will also boost its biotec portfolio. The state footed the bill, but awardede the overall development contractto Rockville-based , which transferred the project to McLean-baseds LLC months later when the latter’s founders split off from Scheer in 2007.
was the generalo contractor, with MWL Architects and McKinneyand Co. servintg as the principal designersand engineers. The building’d opening, hosted by Appian, comesz days after the District pulled backa $133 millionn construction contract to build its own consolidatedf forensics lab in Southwest D.C. because of concerns that competingbids weren’t properly evaluated. D.C. leaders are planning to erect a $220 millio n building on the site of the former Metropolitam Police Department First District Headquarters at 4154th St. SW.