La Plata County plans to open the county’s first morgue in 2022, providing a permanent location for the county Coroner’s Office for the first time.
La Plata County’s morgue will be located next to the county jail along Turner Drive south of Durango and will provide a central location for the operations of the La Plata County Coroner’s Office. The facility is nearing completion after about two years of preparation slowed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Construction of the county’s first morgue comes amid the growth of La Plata County and after years in which the Coroner’s Office has had to rely on other facilities to conduct its autopsies and operations.
“Basically, this just goes to growth in the county,” said La Plata County Manager Chuck Stevens. “As the county population continues to increase, demand for county services continues to increase, and that includes our Coroner’s Office.”
After the Sheriff’s Office moved down the street and other facilities in the county’s jail complex in Bodo Industrial Park were renovated, La Plata County was left with an unused building that the administration decided to retrofit and turn into the county morgue in 2019.
The new facility will have administrative offices, a viewing room for families, a medical room to conduct autopsies and a storage area for the deceased.
The morgue currently has a capacity to store six bodies with an additional body on a gurney, but the Coroner’s Office could expand its storage to about nine, said Jann Smith, the La Plata County coroner.
“If we have to, we could do four (autopsies) a day,” she said.
The county budgeted $390,700 beginning in 2020 for the project, but challenges remodeling the building and the coronavirus pandemic have pushed back the morgue’s opening to sometime in 2022. The project is about a year behind, said Ted Holteen, spokesman for La Plata County.
County coroner staff members currently work out of the administrative offices in the morgue, but the county’s forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Arnall, cannot yet perform autopsies at the facility. The county is waiting on a new dock to unload and load patients after a previous version caused gurneys to tip during tests, Smith said.
“It’s been a challenge compounded by supply chain and construction delays,” Stevens said. “I don’t have a hard date (for when the morgue will be functional), but we are very anxious to get it operational as soon as possible.”
For decades, the county partnered with Hood Mortuary in Durango to use its facilities for autopsies and to store the deceased. But as the area’s population has increased, so has demand for the county’s morgue services. That demand began to impact Hood Mortuary’s business, Stevens said, while the growing influx of patients was also quickly outstripping the capacity of Arnall and the Coroner’s Office to perform autopsies.
“Things have become so busy that it’s just difficult to work out of one room at the mortuary,” Arnall said.
In 2017, La Plata County began considering plans to construct its own morgue. The county went through a search process not unlike its current radar project before settling on an empty building beside the jail.
As construction has dragged on, the county and Coroner’s Office have tried to adapt in the interim. The county bought storage coolers that have moved with the Coroner’s Office. In 2020, La Plata County bought a refrigerated trailer for the Office of Emergency Management, which is where the Coroner’s Office currently stores its COVID-19 patients.
And in October 2021, the Coroner’s Office pivoted its autopsies to the Montezuma County morgue. However, staff members must transport patients back and forth to Cortez multiple times per week, further testing the Coroner’s Office amid a swell in deaths in recent years.
So far this year, La Plata County Coroner’s Office has had 45 cases, a 45% uptick from the same time in 2021, Smith said.
The new morgue will simplify the work of the Coroner’s Office and allow the county to meet the needs of La Plata County’s growing population.
“Sometimes we are a small and mid-sized county and sometimes we’re a mid- to large-sized,” Stevens said. “A lot of the smaller counties won’t have a morgue and they’ll partner with their local (mortuaries). We did that for many years, but we're just at the point where we can’t do that.
“We need to start providing this service on our own,” he said.
ahannon@durangoherald.com
