Sinkhole opens at District crime lab

A sinkhole has opened outside the District’s $215 million crime lab and nearly two weeks after its appearance city officials still don’t know what’s causing it, The DC Line has learned.

The hole opened sometime around May 21 near the side E Street SW entrance on the grounds of the Consolidated Forensic Laboratory, DC Department of Forensic Sciences spokesperson Olivia Dedner confirmed. Pictures from the scene show that the sinkhole is about 3 feet wide and up to 6 feet deep, exposing the foundations of the lab’s parking garage.

Authorities have canvassed a number of possibilities — from rats’ nests to leaks — but they haven’t solved the riddle yet, Dedner said.

Opened in 2013, the multimillion-dollar lab at 401 E St. SW was supposed to be a new sign of the District’s maturity — bringing the latest in forensics and public health science under one roof and liberating the city from having to rely on federal authorities for its crime labs. But the program has been beset by difficulties from its earliest days. In 2015, the DNA lab — the crown jewel of the enterprise — lost its accreditation and had to shut down due to mismanagement. And authorities have never been able to explain how hundreds of firearms were lost or stolen from the lab’s evidence lockers.

Last Halloween, as The DC Line first reported, four floors of the lab were flooded when a careless employee in one of the biohazard labs left the faucets on a sink running, backing up a critical wastewater system that’s supposed to treat toxic water before it flows into the city’s sewer system.

The morning the sinkhole was discovered, May 22, authorities put up cones and tape around the area, worried that someone might fall in. The cones and tape have remained up since then while authorities figure out how extensive the problem is, and what they’re going to do about it, Dedner said.

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Bill Myers lives and works in Washington. Email him at myers101@outlook.com. He tweets from @billcaphill.