A crash on the Bayshore Road approach to the Interstate 75 northbound ramp in North Fort Myers blocked the road at the front of Tuesday evening's peak and cleared within minutes, and the two entries that had held the Highway Patrol board at Bayshore and United States 41 all afternoon are now off it as well

A crash that blocked the Bayshore Road approach to Interstate 75 in North Fort Myers on Tuesday evening cleared within minutes of being logged.

The Florida Highway Patrol entered it on its public dispatch board at 5.49 p.m., at Bayshore Road and the ramp to the northbound interstate at Exit 143. When this desk's automated watch picked the entry up at 5.54 p.m., its status column read that there was a roadblock. On two direct readings of the same board taken at 5.55 p.m. and 5.56 p.m., the status on that row read that the roadway is clear.

That is the whole of what the record says about it. The board carries no injury information, no count of vehicles, no description of them and no cause, and no agency has published a statement on it that this desk could locate. No newsroom has reported it.

At the other end of the same road, the two crash entries this site covered on Tuesday afternoon are gone from the board. Those were at North Tamiami Trail and Bayshore Road, the United States 41 junction about five miles west, logged at 12.28 p.m. and 3.39 p.m., with the right turn lanes blocked. Neither appears on either reading taken on Tuesday evening, against a board of 117 and then 116 statewide entries that parsed normally and returned four Lee County rows.

The distinction there is worth keeping. The Highway Patrol does not publish a reopening notice, so an entry leaving the board is dispatch retiring a call rather than an agency saying the lanes are open. The evening entry at Exit 143 is the one that states its own status, and that status is clear.

Two other Lee County rows sat on the board at the same reading, both hit and run crashes on Interstate 75, one at mile marker 141 in Fort Myers listed as roadway clear and one southbound at mile marker 121 in Bonita Springs listed as no roadblock. The fourth row is the Bonita Springs crash at mile marker 117 that this site covered earlier on Tuesday, which now carries a clearance stamp of 4.32 p.m. and reads clear.

One note on the times, because it is the thing most likely to be got wrong. The board prints its timestamps on a twelve hour clock with no marker for morning or afternoon. Across the 117 row board the hours present ran 1 through 5 and 8 through 12, never 13 or higher, which settles the format but not the half of the day. These are evening. The Exit 143 entry was absent from every earlier five minute poll on Tuesday and appeared for the first time five minutes after its 5.49 stamp. A watch running every five minutes since before dawn would have caught a 5.49 a.m. entry in the morning, and it did not.