KEARNEY, Mo. — The Clay County Sheriff’s Office identified the construction worker who died in a bridge collapse near Kearney, Missouri, Wednesday afternoon.
Connor Ernst, a 22-year old from California, Missouri, was pouring concrete when the bridge collapsed.
Ernst and three other construction workers were trapped in a mixture of wet concrete and rubble. The other three workers were able to get out.
On Wednesday, the sheriff’s office said it took firefighters 90 minutes to extricate Ernst, but on Thursday, they corrected that to 50 minutes. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The crew was working on the 148th Street Bridge near Kearney, scheduled to be completed by the Spring.
The bridge had been closed since 2016 and used to be a single-lane wooden bridge over Carroll Creek, but was approved to be reconstructed into a two-lane paved bridge.