A call the state first published as a disabled vehicle on northbound Interstate 75 at Naples has been retyped twice in seven minutes and now reads as a crash with injuries, with the left and center lanes blocked at mile marker 111 and troopers on scene since 4.40 with the lanes still down
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The Florida Highway Patrol dispatch board is carrying a crash on Interstate 75 northbound at mile marker 111 in Naples with the left and center lanes blocked. The call was received at 4.29 this afternoon and a unit was recorded dispatched to it at 4.30.
A unit was recorded on scene at 4.40, eleven minutes after the call came in. On the last reading behind this item, taken at 4.49, the left and center lanes were still blocked, so the remarks field has not moved in the nine minutes since the unit arrived.
What makes this call worth setting down rather than passing over is that the state has changed its own description of it twice while this item was being written.
When the row first appeared it was published as a disabled vehicle in the roadway with the center lane blocked. That is the most routine entry this board carries and it is ordinarily beneath any coverage at all. Within about seven minutes it had been retyped to a crash with a roadblock, then its remarks field had grown a second lane to read left and center lanes are blocked, then it had been retyped again to a crash with injuries.
This is one call being reclassified and not three separate calls. The receipt stamp of 4.29, the dispatch stamp of 4.30, the county, the location string and the published coordinates are identical on every reading. This desk recorded the same behaviour in the opposite direction on August 19, when a Lee County call went from a crash with injuries to a disabled vehicle with nothing else about it moving, and treated that as one call retyped. The same test applies here. Both classifications stand in this item rather than the later one quietly replacing the earlier.
The board was genuinely populated on every reading, carrying 85 and 87 incident rows statewide across 28 counties on the readings where rows were counted, so none of them is a failed read reporting a false all clear.
The practical effect for anyone on that road is two of the three northbound lanes down at the front end of the afternoon peak, being worked but not yet clearing.
Beyond the board the public record is empty. There is no cause, no vehicle count, no injury count, no names and no vehicle types. The word injuries is the state's own classification of the call and is the whole of what the record says about anyone being hurt. The Highway Patrol has issued no release, the Collier County Sheriff's Office has issued no release, and no outlet had the crash when this was written. Nobody has been accused of anything.
The coordinates the state publishes for this scene reverse geocode to Interstate 75 in Collier County, postcode 34119, which is consistent with the board's own Naples tag. No exit number or cross street is offered here. Neither could be confirmed on this run, and an unverified exit is worse than none for a reader trying to plan a way around the scene.
One weather product is active over Collier County, a Special Weather Statement issued by the National Weather Service in Miami at 4.02 for a strong thunderstorm near Copeland carrying gusts of 45 to 50 mph. Its named locations are Carnestown, Copeland, Big Cypress National Preserve, Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, Jerome and Deep Lake, all of them tens of miles southeast of mile marker 111. Nothing here offers that storm as a factor in this crash.
A last caution about the board itself, for anyone minded to check it later. It publishes no clearance column of any kind, which was verified on today's readings rather than carried over. A row coming off it is the state ending publication of the call, and it is not the state announcing that the lanes have reopened. When this board does record a clearance it says so in the remarks field, the way the one other Southwest Florida entry on it, a southbound crash at mile marker 128 in Fort Myers, reads no roadblock. This Collier row has never carried that wording.
