Bodies are piling up at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office due to frozen pipes that have delayed autopsies.
The recent bout of sub-freezing temperatures has thrown a wrench into the 24-hour operation that sees roughly 15 to 25 autopsies a day conducted.
The pipes are frozen at the Southwest Institute of Forensic Science, where the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office resides, per Fox 4 KDFW. Without running water, autopsies cannot be conducted.
As recently reported by The Dallas Express, an arctic airmass descended on North Texas over the weekend and is expected to linger until Wednesday. Some school districts, such as Dallas ISD, have announced class cancellations, and several municipal operations have been forced to adjust operations due to the freeze.
Normally, as Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price explained to Fox 4, the medical examiner’s office would consider moving its operations to the nearby Health and Human Services building. However, it also has no running water due to frozen pipes.
The result has been a significant backlog of autopsies and no indication of when medical examiner staff can return to work. Waiting for the pipes to dethaw could take time, yet replacing the lines if they burst could take significantly longer.
To Price, the situation is dire since the dead bodies keep coming in. While the average autopsy takes roughly an hour, those involving gunshots can take as many as four hours — not to mention the associated paperwork.
“They run about 11 autopsy techs per shift,” said Price. “They usually can move whatever they’ve gotten in, but it doesn’t take much. One little glitch and everything starts to back up.”
In Dallas, the homicide rate rose by 15% last year, according to the City’s crime analytics dashboard. The new year has shown no sign of this pace slowing down, with nine homicides already logged as of January 15. Black and Hispanic individuals make up the overwhelming majority of murder victims in Dallas, as reported by The Dallas Express. Budgeting only $654 million for DPD this year, City officials will be spending much less than other high-crime jurisdictions, like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
However, it is not just homicide victims that go under the knife at the medical examiner’s office. Any wrongful or suspicious death in which the cause cannot be established by inspection alone may require an autopsy.
