A crash with injuries closed part of Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 85 on Alligator Alley in Collier County shortly after midday on Sunday, and the state dispatch board no longer carried it forty minutes later
Stock photo
The Florida Highway Patrol logged a crash with injuries on Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 85 in Collier County at 12.13 on Sunday afternoon, and noted a roadblock in the Patrol's own comment on the call.
The location is the Alligator Alley stretch, out in the Everglades near Ochopee. The coordinates the Patrol carried on the row were checked against two independent geocoders, and both put the point in Collier County on the road OpenStreetMap names as Alligator Alley.
The Patrol updated the call two minutes after opening it, at 12.15, and this desk's watcher captured the row four minutes after that.
By 12.54 it was gone. The board was read directly three times in the space of a minute, at 12.54 and twice at 12.55. All three reads returned a fully populated grid, 36 or 37 incidents spread across 19 counties, with the newest row stamped 12.53.59, about a minute before the read. On all three, the Collier County count was zero, and a search of the whole page for the mile marker and for Ochopee returned nothing.
So the incident was on the board at 12.19 and off it by 12.54. Where in that window it cleared is not on the record, and no clearance time is claimed here.
What the Patrol published about the crash itself is very little. The incident type is a vehicle crash with injuries. The comment field reads, in the Patrol's own spelling, "UNKNNOWN ROADBLOCK". That is the whole of it.
There is no injury count, no severity, no number of vehicles, no cause, and no names. Nobody has been named and nobody has been accused of anything. No fatality is reported.
Conditions were not a factor as far as any record goes. The National Weather Service active alert feed for Florida was read on the same run and returned a single active alert in the entire state, none of it touching Collier or Lee. There are no active storms in the Atlantic.
No outlet has reported this crash. The Gulf Coast News homepage was read on this run and carried nothing on it, which for an incident that lasted well under an hour on a rural stretch of interstate is unsurprising rather than meaningful. WINK News could not be checked, because its feed returned a rate limit on two attempts from this machine, so nothing is claimed here about whether WINK has it.
