A double-lane closure is running on the northbound inside lanes of the Edison Bridge in the middle of a Tuesday, and when the joint work there is finished the department will move the same closure across to the outside lanes

The Edison Bridge is down two northbound lanes and a shoulder this evening, and the Florida Department of Transportation has not said when it will get them back.

The department's notice, on a project page stamped today, says a double-lane closure is currently in effect on the northbound inside lanes and shoulder of the bridge so that crews can maintain bridge joints. Gulf Coast News reported the closure as current at 6.10 this evening, attributing it to FDOT Southwest Florida.

The part a regular driver will care about comes next in the same notice. When the work on the inside lanes and shoulder is done, the department says, the double-lane closure will be shifted to the northbound outside lanes and shoulder. The bridge does not go back to full width at the end of this phase. The closure changes sides and the work carries on.

What the notice does not contain is any time at all. There is no start time, no end time and no expected reopening for either half of it. The department points drivers to FL511.com for real-time updates rather than to an estimate of its own, and on this occasion it has not offered one to point at.

It is also worth being plain about a detail the department has left unclear. This notice does not say how many northbound lanes remain open. The notice covering last week's closure on this same bridge said the inside travel lane would remain fully open, in the singular, while this one closes the northbound inside lanes, in the plural. Those two cannot both be read literally, so the honest answer is that two lanes and the shoulder are shut and the live position is on FL511.

The hour is the other thing that stands out. The department's published working hours for this job run between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., which is when intermittent closures on the Edison Bridge have been scheduled since July 31. This one has been sitting on the bridge through a Tuesday.

That is the second time in four days. The closure that started at 8 p.m. on Friday, August 7 also ran into the daylight, and the department explained why in that notice: the closure had to hold long enough for the required curing period before lanes went back into service. No such explanation is attached to this one.

The sequence earlier in the week came from the department by way of North Fort Myers Neighbor, which published an FDOT release on Monday saying a double-lane closure would go on the northbound inside lanes and shoulder at 8 p.m. that night, and that it would be reduced to a single-left lane closure at 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning. The department's own page today describes a double-lane closure in effect. Whether the reduction did not hold or the full closure was restored during the day, the department does not say, and there is no point guessing at it.

For anyone who would rather not sit in it, the other crossing is the answer, as it was on Saturday. The US 41 bridge over the Caloosahatchee runs alongside and carries no daytime restriction, although it has overnight work of its own under the same contract.

Nothing else is going wrong around it. The Florida Highway Patrol dispatch board, read just before 7 this evening, carried a single entry anywhere in Lee or Collier county: a hit and run crash logged at 5.47 this morning on I-75 southbound at mile marker 121 in Bonita Springs, marked as no roadblock. That is thirty miles south of this bridge and thirteen hours old. The board does not carry county or city streets, which should be treated as unreported rather than confirmed clear.

The conditions are quiet otherwise. There is no National Weather Service alert touching Lee or Collier beyond a heat advisory on each, no active storm anywhere in the Atlantic, and no drinking water advisory in Collier County or the City of Fort Myers. Power is normal on both county meters, with 52 customers out in Lee and 209 in Collier.

The job behind all of this is not close to finished. The contract is worth $1.17 million and runs on both river crossings at once: bridge joints on the two structures that carry Business 41 over the Edison Bridge, and pile jackets on the US 41 bridge over the Caloosahatchee beside it. The department's schedule carries intermittent overnight closures on the Edison Bridge through September, and on the Caloosahatchee Bridge, where the pile jacket work began on May 21, through September as well.

So there will be more of these. The department adds its own standing caveat to the schedule, that it is subject to change due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances, and this week is the second reminder in four days that the published overnight window is how it usually goes rather than how it always will.