Investigator Raschael Ellering held the door for a person wheeling a body to the cooling area at the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office. ] RENEE JONES SCHNEIDER
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office will sit out the organized mayhem of Super Bowl week.
The agency, which has been eyeing a more permanent move to meet growing demand, this week announced plans to temporarily relocate its operations from downtown Minneapolis to the Metro First Call facility in Savage.
The relocation will begin on Jan. 28 and continue through Feb. 5, the day after the game.
During that time, autopsies will be performed at the recently-renovated facility at 12600 Creek View Avenue, where bodies will also be stored until claimed for burial, while autopsies of patients who died at Hennepin County Medical Center will take place at the main office downtown Minneapolis. The office will be closed to walk-ins.
"Decedents transported to the Medical Examiner's Office will be stored and released from the Metro First Call facility during this time," the agency said in a statement posted to its website. "HCMC Hospital deaths will be stored and released from the Medical Examiner's Office. The Metro First Call facility will serve as a back-up location."
The frenzied lead-up to the Feb. 4 game is expected to slow traffic and make parking difficult around U.S. Bank Stadium.
Initially, the medical examiner's office expressed concern about access to to its current building on Chicago Avenue, which abuts the security perimeter that will be established around the stadium on the weekend of the game. But officials said they had worked out such issues after months of careful planning and back-and-forth negotiations with Super Bowl organizers.
Meanwhile, its investigators will work out of satellite offices in in Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis, Savage and Apple Valley, while responding to death scenes across Hennepin, Dakota and Scott counties — an area that includes about one-third of the state's population.
Growing demand for its services has had agency looking for a new home in the city's more spacious western suburbs.
Last fall, the county board approved a contract for the initial design of a new, 69,000-square foot regional medical examiner's facility in Minnetonka. Construction could begin as early as August 2019, with an expected opening date of 2020.