Driving down State Street you can see a new project being composed by the North Dakota Health and Human Services Department. Since 2020, the department has been looking for a new building that would supply them with more space. Building the new lab will provide the boost they have been searching for. The new lab will serve as a facility to replace the deficient existing one used now.
“We’re working with very cramped quarters, so much so that we have some extractors or analyzers that are actually sitting out of non-laboratory spaces,” Laboratory Director Christie Massen said.
State-of-the-art training facilities, along with lab and classroom facilities, will be included in the new facility. Construction of the building will cost around 70 million dollars opposed to the 15 million dollars they were given originally.
A wide spread of unorganized materials is seen throughout the lab in various places, making it hard to navigate through machinery and studies.
COVID-19 was an outbreak of numbers and illnesses, making it harder to study in the small and tight quarters. With illnesses being spread daily, the employees have had to make the best out of the limited space they were given.
“During COVID, we went from doing 100 tests a day to doing over 8,000 a day, just for COVID testing,” Massen said.
The lab was unprepared for the COVID-19 outbreak, which made an organized space non-existent.
During COVID-19, the lab had to expand with 3 trailers to give them extra space for treating and studying. During the pandemic, many National Guard members had to share space with lab employees, making the building extremely busy in every corner. Today, even after the National guard has moved out, the facility remains cramped. The new lab, however, will include new features dedicated to the National Guard’s duties of unknown substance and white powder substance testing.
“We actually had to add three trailers, temporary trailers, that we turned into laboratories. They’re housing very expensive equipment in a non-permanent structure, and not convenient in the middle of winter,” Massen said.
Roadblocks like the efficient working situation, as well as be able to expand some additional programs, and then be able to get rid of the renting distribution center,” Massen said.
A new addition to the department’s programs would benefit the citizens of North Dakota by offering more testing.
The lab serves the citizens by keeping up to date with new illness trends and new diagnoses, keeping North Dakota safe and informed.
“In the Department of Health and Human Services, our section is laboratory services, so we do human testing,” Massen said.
In the lab, various instruments and machines are used to test various samples. They also test the quality of drinking water, cultures and investigate samples of food-borne illness outbreaks.
The State Lab facility is expected to be fully operational in 2026. Construction started in April of 2024 and faced multiple challenges, like heavy rains and the many graffiti artists of Bismarck.
“There are always bumps in the road…right before the beam raising ceremony, in October, we got vandalized,” Massie said.
The site held up the rain, and all the graffiti will be covered easily, a simple fix on a big project.
Every detail of the new facility has been drawn out and planned. Three floors and 100,000 square feet of labs and offices provide new opportunities to expand studies into the toxicology of non-fatal overdose, hematology and chemistry tests.
Different tests require different machinery, which most of the time cannot be used in the same room, the current issue delays productivity. Things as little as the air temperature or flow can be crucial to a study. All the little and large setbacks will be accounted for in the new state lab building.
The lab will be able to be toured by citizens for all to see. This lab is the future of the health department and an improvement for the citizens of North Dakota.