Johnson County Medical Examiner’s Office New Construction
Project Name
Medical Examiner's Office
Size (sq ft)
32,000
HEI Project Profile - Long
After studying coroner service delivery and facility options for a decade, Johnson County decided to construct a new medical examiner’s office, rather than continue having the services outsourced. The new office encompassed several state-of-the-art areas including a toxicology lab, imaging via Lodox and CT, anthropology, and autopsy spaces with observation areas. When it comes to critical facilities, Henderson Engineers identifies and emphasizes the features that are most important to the compelling nature of these types of buildings. The risk of systems failure in a morgue is highly critical so Henderson made a concerted effort to eliminate downtime by incorporating redundant cooling and ventilation systems, in addition to coordinating the emergency operations to offer the desired amount of continued operation in the tragic event of power failure. The systems design utilized ionization technology to apply superior odor capture at the space level for both occupant comfort and odor mitigation external to the facility. The exhaust implemented a dilution style system with a high-plume design to minimize odors from adversely affecting neighbors and other buildings nearby. Special attention was given to the facility to be respectful to the decedent while giving the public spaces a feeling of warmth and comfort for families. The project was designed applying fundamentals of LEED version 4 and portions of the WELL Building Standard.