A crash with a roadblock landed on Bonita Beach Road at the Interstate 75 interchange in Bonita Springs at a quarter past four on Monday afternoon, and the Highway Patrol entry was off the state dispatch board about ten minutes later
A crash blocked traffic on Bonita Beach Road at the Interstate 75 interchange in Bonita Springs on Monday afternoon, and the Florida Highway Patrol had the entry off its dispatch board roughly ten minutes later.
The board logged it at 4.15 p.m. in Lee County, at Bonita Beach Road South East where it meets Interstate 75, and recorded the type as a vehicle crash with a roadblock. It stamped the entry a second time at 4.20 p.m. There was no third stamp before the row disappeared.
That is the whole of the record. No cause, no vehicle count, no lane count and no injury appears anywhere on it, and the same board uses a separate wording when there are injuries, so nothing is claimed here about casualties in either direction.
How the time is pinned
The times on that board print on a twelve hour clock with no morning or afternoon marker, so the printed cell alone cannot say which half of the day it belongs to.
This desk's own monitor of the same board settles it. It reads the board every five minutes and stamps each reading in universal time. Its cycle at fourteen minutes past four in the afternoon, Eastern, raised nothing, and the reading at nineteen minutes past was the first that held this row, which puts the crash on the board between those two and rules out a quarter past four in the morning.
A short block in an expensive place
Ten minutes is not long, and this was ten minutes at close to the worst hour of the day for that junction.
Bonita Beach Road is the east to west spine of Bonita Springs, and its interchange with Interstate 75 is exit 116. It is the direct link between the interstate, Old 41 through the middle of town, and the road out to the beaches, which is why traffic turned back from the ramps has very little to fall back on except the surface streets either side.
The coordinates on the entry, 26.3316 north and 81.7481 west, place it at that interchange rather than out along the road in either direction.
What cleared, and what that does not mean
The Highway Patrol does not post a reopening event, and none is invented here.
What can be said is that the entry was logged at 4.15, was stamped for the last time at 4.20, and was gone when the board was read again at 4.25, at 4.27 and at half past four. Each of those three reads returned a populated board of about eighty incidents across the whole of Florida, so the absence is a real absence and not a broken reading.
Those same reads leave one incident standing in Lee or Collier county, and it is not this one. It is an unrelated crash on Interstate 75 northbound near Immokalee in Collier, logged at 3.12 in the afternoon and carrying a clearance stamp at 3.32.
One limit applies to all of that. The state dispatch board covers state roads, so a clear result for Lee County means the state highways are clear and says nothing about a county road or a city street, which are sheriff's calls and never appear on it.
No newsroom has this
Nothing about this incident has been reported anywhere.
Gulf Coast News publishes a dated traffic blotter most days, and its round up for August 10 went out at nine minutes past three in the afternoon, about an hour before this crash, with no mention of Bonita Beach Road in it. WINK News could not be read at all while this was checked, because its search feed refused three requests in a row for hitting it too often, so its silence proves nothing either way.
The record here is the state's own dispatch board and this desk's timed readings of it.
