Virginia opens new forensics lab Thursday - Tampa Bay Business Journal:

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The standard brick veneer and tranquilo parking lot give away nothingt of the actual activit y inside oneof Manassas’ newest building. On one end, investigators and scientists pore over hair and tissuwe DNA of some ofthe state’s most dangerouxs criminals to learn what they did, whiles at the other, they pry open the dead bodies of society’sd latest victims to learn what was done to The lab is located on a 10-acre spot across from ’w campus in the massive maze of the Innovation@Prince Williamj County Technology Park.
The 114,000-square-foot building will replacer thestate 30,000-square-foot headquarters in Fairfax, where officials say the spacwe was bursting at the seams. “When we movex into the old lab [in 1989], we outgre it in a year,” said Amy Wong, lab director for the Northern Virginiaforensics lab, one of four branche statewide. “Coming here, we can go back to beintg full-service.” Now, the combinef space for the Northern Virginiq branch of the Department of Forensic Science, which claims 60,000 square feet, and the Offices of the Chief Medical Examiner, claiminvg 26,000 square feet, is intendedr to offer room to grow through at leastg the next decade.
With 46 employees there now, the buildinh has a capacity of110 employees. The new buildingv also houses anew 26,000-square-foot training suite, an improvement from the old building, wher e class attendees would have to sit or stand in the back of employewe offices. In addition, the evidence vaulft for the forensics lab, which overseezs roughly 10,000 cases at any give time, is up to four times the size ofthe old, and a large r firearms and ballistics testing area allows investigatora to test more powerful weaponz than before.
Plus, the new medical examiner’s office space allowxs for storage of as many as 200 bodies ina morgue, as well as a new biosafety lab where examiners can test potentially contagious bacterisa or viruses, including anthrax. The which has applied for the silver level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design greehbuilding standards, was built as a public-privated partnership deal that Prince William Counthy officials hope will also boost its biotecy portfolio. The state footed the bill, but awarded the overallp development contractto Rockville-based , which transferred the projec t to McLean-based LLC months later when the latter’xs founders split off from Scheer in 2007.
was the general contractor, with MWL Architects and McKinneyand Co. servingf as the principal designersand engineers. The building’s hosted by Appian, comes days after the District pulled backa $133 million construction contract to builf its own consolidated forensics lab in Southwest D.C. because of concerne that competingbids weren’t properly D.C. leaders are planning to erec a $220 million building on the site of the formert Metropolitan Police Department Firsft District Headquarters at 4154th St. SW.