A crash took the left northbound lane of Interstate 75 out of service at Bonita Springs at the front of Tuesday afternoon's peak, and the Florida Highway Patrol marked the roadway clear on its own board twenty nine minutes later

A crash took the left northbound lane of Interstate 75 out of service at Bonita Springs at three minutes past four on Tuesday afternoon, and the Florida Highway Patrol has since marked the roadway clear.

The state dispatch board logged the incident at 4.03 p.m. at mile marker 117, in Lee County, northbound, as a vehicle crash with a roadblock. A reading of that board at nine minutes past four carried the remark that the left lane was blocked. The entry was stamped a third and final time at 4.32 p.m., and the remark on it now reads that the roadway is clear.

On the board's own first and last stamps that is a span of about twenty nine minutes. That is the period the board records rather than a published reopening time. The Highway Patrol does not post a restoration event, and none is invented here.

The type field on the entry records a vehicle crash with a roadblock and does not record injuries. The same board uses a separate wording when there are injuries, and used it on eight other entries in the same reading, in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Clay among others. So nothing is claimed here about casualties in either direction, and the board says nothing at all about cause.

Mile marker 117 is a consequential place to lose a lane at that hour. Exit numbers on Interstate 75 in Florida follow the mile markers, which puts this immediately north of the Bonita Beach Road interchange at 116, and well south of Corkscrew Road at 123.

That is the stretch that carries Naples traffic north and Fort Myers traffic south with nothing useful running alongside it. It is the reason the clock matters more than the duration on an incident like this one. A blocked lane there in the small hours is a minor event. The same blocked lane at three minutes past four on a Tuesday sits at the front of the afternoon peak, and a queue built in twenty nine minutes of peak traffic takes considerably longer than twenty nine minutes to drain. Drivers on that stretch may still meet the back of it after the lane itself has reopened.

The times on that board print on a twelve hour clock with no morning or afternoon marker, so the printed field alone cannot say which half of the day an entry belongs to. Two separate readings settle this one in the afternoon. This desk's monitor polls the same board every five minutes and stamps each reading in universal time, and the reading that first carried the 4.08 stamp was taken at nine minutes past four in the afternoon, Eastern, which put that stamp thirty seconds in the past when it was read. A direct fetch of the board at twenty to five returned a set of newest entries statewide stamped within about a minute of the fetch, which fixes the afternoon reading independently.

That same direct reading returned ninety six incidents statewide and this one entry in either Lee or Collier county. There was nothing else on a state road in Southwest Florida at that moment.

A near empty board is worth having, with the usual limit attached to it. It carries state roads. It does not carry county roads or city streets, so an empty result means the state highways are clear and says nothing whatever about the rest.

No local newsroom reported this incident. The record here is the state's own dispatch board and this desk's timed readings of it.

The only National Weather Service alert in effect anywhere nearby is a heat advisory running to seven o'clock on Tuesday evening, and it covers Collier County rather than Lee, so it has no bearing on this stretch of road.