SUMMERVILLE, Ga. - Boxes are piled on the floor and yellow notes marked "HQ" are labeled throughout the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's toxicology lab.
One by one, lab tech Cara Parris plucks beakers and test tubes from the shelves. The cracked ones are thrown away and the rest are tightly packed to be shipped to the Atlanta office.
As Summerville crime lab employees get ready for the lab's closure Wednesday, local authorities say they're preparing to go back in time.
"We'll have to revert back to the days of going down to Atlanta," Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said. "All it's doing is putting the burden from the state to the county."
The Summerville lab is one of three the GBI chose last year to close after state budget cuts. But state lawmakers allocated nine months of funding to keep the labs going until March.
While the Columbus, Ga., lab received local funds to stay open through June, the Moultrie lab also wil close Wednesday, said Dr. George Herrin, who's in charge of the crime labs for the GBI.
The labs were chosen based on the "the volume of case work and the difficulty to staff a lab," Dr. Herrin said.
Summerville worked about 3,500 cases al year - about 5 percent of the total cases - with eight employees. Each employee at Summerville was given the option to relocate, but only two took the offer, he said.
But officials in the 10 counties affected by the lab's closing say the burden now falls on local shoulders.
One of the biggest problems will be how to get evidence to a GBI lab, Sheriff Wilson said. Employees can mail some evidence, but most has to be driven to Atlanta.
"It's going to create quite a bit of backlog, not just with us getting evidence, but in the court," said Patrick Doyle, deputy commander of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Drug Task force.
In the past, the drug task force delivered evidence for meth investigations to the Summerville crime lab a couple of times a week, Agent Doyle said. Now one of the agents will have to plan a day to drive to Atlanta to deliver evidence, he said.
Meth cases in the Lookout Mountain circuit, which covers Dade, Walker and Catoosa counties, now have a turnaround rate in the lab of about two weeks to a month, Agent Doyle said. But he worries that using the Atlanta lab will cause to backups lasting for months.
Lookout Mountain District Attorney Herbert "Buzz" Franklin said cases could be delayed further when a chemist is needed to testify in court.
Dr. Herrin said the Atlanta lab has been staffed to adjust to the added cases. Through a federal grant, Dr. Herrin hired 50 people. Half of those are in Atlanta and the other half are divided among the other four labs in Georgia.
As long as the labs can stay staffed at 280 employees for the state, Dr. Herrin said he thinks local law enforcement will not have to deal with any backlogs in the system.
"It's actually much more efficient to have one place to run all the evidence," he said.