Safety
Workers Charge Negligence In 2022 Kansas City-Area Bridge Collapse
Workers were buried in wet concrete and one was killed when a bridge collapsed near Kansas City in 2022, lawsuits allege
Workers who fell into wet concrete when a bridge collapsed in 2022 near Kansas City, Mo., are seeking damages for the injuries they say they suffered.
Photo courtesy of Tim Van Ronzelen
Three workers involved in a 2022 Kansas City-area bridge collapse have filed separate lawsuits alleging that engineers were negligent in their design of falsework and that improper inspections of those temporary supports by another firm led to the bridge’s failure.
The three lawsuits were filed May 1 in the Circuit Court of Clay County, Mo., by Kaden Bax, Colton Wells and Braden Birdsong, with all three seeking unspecified damages for the injuries and lasting mental health impacts they say they suffered in the accident.
A confidential settlement has already been reached in a lawsuit filed by the family of another worker, Connor R. Ernst, 22, of California, Mo., who drowned in wet concrete in the bridge collapse, the lawsuits state.
The lawsuits each name Crockett Engineering Consultants of Columbia Mo., WSP USA, Inc. of St. Louis and the owner, Clay County, Mo., as defendants.
The project involved replacement of a dilapidated wooden bridge on Northeast 148th Street, east of Kearney, Mo., with a continuous concrete bridge composed of three spans. The bridge deck was a reinforced concrete slab approximately 12-in thick, supported on substructures.
The lawsuits allege that on Oct. 26, 2022, during a concrete placement operation for the new bridge, when less than half of the attempted concrete placement was completed, “suddenly and without warning, the falsework collapsed, sending a river of wet concrete into Carroll Creek along with tons of twisted metal rebar and shattered wood forms.”
The workers were employed by Lehman Construction Co., of California, Mo., which hired Crockett Engineering to design the falsework.
Lehman is not named in the lawsuit, but was fined $12,031 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 2023 in relation to the bridge collapse. The penalty was reduced to $9,023.
The three workers were on the top of the bridge and plummeted to the bottom of the creek where they were buried in concrete, the lawsuits state. Wells was up to his chin in wet concrete for 30 minutes; Bax was up to his waist and Birdsong was up to his neck.
Birdsong, for instance, his lawsuit says, was "held in that position—in pitch darkness, unable to move even a finger and almost suffocating from wet concrete—for thirty minutes, until rescue workers found him covered by broken plywood forms."
Among the allegations, the lawsuits claim that Crockett failed to create falsework that was sufficient to support the concrete and that WSP failed to recognize that the falsework designs were incomplete and insufficient.
"It was foreseeable that failure of the falsework during the concrete pour could and would cause bodily injury to workers on the project,” the lawsuits each say.
The lawsuits also allege that Clay County knew or should have known of the dangerous conditions and could have warned, remedied or remediated them.
Clay County Attorney Kevin Graham said he has not seen the lawsuits, but said “we don’t do that type of work. That’s not our expertise. That’s why we hire companies to do that.”
Attorney Tim Van Ronzelen, who represents Bax, Wells and Birdsong in their respective cases, said the suits were filed separately because they each suffered different injuries.
Crockett Engineering and WSP did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuits.
