A van driver slammed into a highway construction lift inside a North Shore tunnel, sending one worker falling to the pavement and the other clinging for his life above..
The incident occurred shortly before 4 p.m. Wednesday inside the Lafayette Bluff Tunnel on Hwy. 61 about 7 miles north of Two Harbors in Silver Lake Township, the State Patrol said.
The driver of the sprinter van and the worker who fell were taken by air ambulance to a hospital with critical injuries, the patrol said.
The worker who avoided plummeting to the highway was slightly injured and did not require hospitalization, the patrol added.
The van was heading north in a single-lane construction zone when it crossed into the closed lane inside the tunnel, “hit multiple orange barrels and crashed into the scissor lift,” which was extended to the ceiling, a patrol statement read.
A bruised up Bradley Nicholas Kostiuk, 37, of Duluth, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that “we could hear the van hitting barrels coming toward us. We didn’t have but a second to react. He was going seemingly full speed before making contact with the lift.”
In that instant, Kostiuk said, “I was able pull myself into the lighting system we were installing as the lift was swept out from under me.”
He said he was stranded about 25 feet up for more than 20 minutes and watched as passersby and then emergency medical personnel came to the aid of coworker Benjamin John Kidd, 27, also of Duluth.
