A bridge under construction in Kearney, Missouri collapsed on October 26, killing one person and injuring three others who were trapped under the wreckage.
The Sheriff’s office in Clay County said that the bridge was located at NE 148th Street and Shady Grove Road and collapsed in the middle of the afternoon.
Construction workers had been pouring concrete on the bridge’s deck and the work was almost finished.
Upon collapse, the bridge caved in on top of workers, and the three surviving victims were able to get out from an opening in the rubble.
The deceased was Connor Ernst, a 22-year-old construction worker from California, Missouri.
According to the Sheriff’s office, they had no warning about structural problems with the bridge before the collapse. There are no previous safety concerns, according to the Clay County Highway Department, and an engineer had inspected the construction progress earlier in the day and found no issues.
The construction company working on the bridge was Lehman Construction. They were hired by the County to build the superstructure slab bridge.
The bridge was one of two currently being constructed in the county, and it spans from Carroll Creek to Shady Grove Road just outside of Kearney.
The project cost about $1.41 million and was funded through a shared partnership between Clay County and the federal government. Construction started in 2021 and was expected to be completed in 2023.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which had previously fined Lehman Construction in 2019 for violating safe working conditions, will investigate the circumstances that led to the bridge’s collapse.
The Sheriff’s office said it would turn the investigations over to the safety administration.
