Is Haines, dying to have a new morgue?

The Haines Borough’s new morgue is in the design phase with plans to begin construction this fall. However, some have questioned the prudence of using CARES Act dollars to pay for the project.

Over the course of the past few months, the assembly has been working to finalize a spending plan for roughly $4 million the borough is scheduled to receive through the CARES Act, a federal coronavirus recovery package passed this spring. The assembly plans to use $200,000 to build a new borough morgue next to the current public safety building.

Advocates cite the current morgue’s inadequacies as the primary motivation for directing CARES Act money toward the project.

At a meeting in June, assembly member Brenda Josephson said replacing the morgue is important both for safety reasons and to allow the deceased to be handled with dignity.

The borough’s current morgue is a refrigerated room in the public safety building, sandwiched between the jail and the police garage. Lack of space in the building means that loved ones must view bodies in the garage, taking up police space and creating contamination concerns, public facilities director Ed Coffland said. In addition, the morgue’s refrigeration unit releases noxious fumes whenever it’s turned on, so if there’s a body in the morgue, the garage door needs to be cracked to allow adequate ventilation.

The new building will address these issues, said Coffland, who is designing the structure. The building will include two rooms—a refrigerated room, and a second one for body viewing and preparation—and a covered porch to accommodate additional visitors.

For some, a new, permanent morgue is a questionable use of CARES Act funding.

At the time the assembly was finalizing a spending plan for the morgue, several residents testified in favor of using the CARES Act funds for other coronavirus-related costs.

Increased funding for small businesses should take precedence over capital projects like the morgue, Thom Ely said during public testimony at a finance committee meeting in June.

According to U.S. Treasury Department guidelines, the CARES Act funding should be used exclusively to cover “necessary expenditures incurred due to…COVID-19” between March 1 and Dec. 30 of this year.

Advocates have argued that a new morgue is a permissible use of CARES Act funds as it will increase the borough’s capacity to respond to deaths in the event of a local COVID-19 outbreak. The current morgue can accommodate up to two bodies. The new one will be able to accommodate up to four.

Based on available medical data, a surge of deaths in Haines as a result of COVID-19 is unlikely.

In general, people do not die instantly of COVID-19, Haines health center director Lylith Widmer said. “Patients who deteriorate tend to do so in a five to ten-day window after symptom onset,” although this window can shorten if patients are obese, elderly or have chronic lung disease.

Widmer encourages people to be proactive about seeking help if they think they might have COVID-19. Unless a person waits to seek medical assistance, those with more severe cases of COVID-19 are likely to be medevacked before the disease reaches a fatal point.

“My threshold for requesting hospitalization is lower for COVID-19,” Widmer said. “If you look kind of sick and you have (COVID-19), we would be sending you (to a hospital) earlier.”

It is possible that if regional hospitals in Anchorage, Juneau, Sitka and Seattle were overwhelmed, the number of deaths occuring in Haines could rise, but “things would have to be really, really bad (to overwhelm all regional hospitals),” Widmer said.

Alaska Municipal League executive director Nils Andreassen said to his knowledge, Haines is the only community in Alaska that has set aside CARES Act funds for a new morgue, but it may still be a valid use of the money.

“It’s up to the local government to determine if it is necessary during this current public health emergency,” Andreassen said. “There is nothing in Treasury guidance that would disallow it beyond that, that I know of.”

Other communities in the Lower 48 have bulked up morgue space in response to the pandemic. In St. Louis, Missouri, officials constructed a 1,300-body temporary morgue structure that cost $1.7 million. The morgue has received pushback from some who believe it was a poor use of money. In the two months following its construction, the morgue housed a total of roughly 50 bodies.

The design of the new Haines morgue should be completed by the end of the month, Coffland said, allowing construction to begin as early as September. He said the hope is to allow local contractors to bid on the project and employ as many Haines residents as possible.

Although construction will begin this year, Coffland said it is unlikely the morgue will be completed until 2021.