The Florida Highway Patrol has stamped its crash involving one of its own patrol cars on Interstate 75 northbound at mile marker 131 in Fort Myers cleared at 6.55 p.m., forty seven minutes after it was logged, and the roadblock column never moved off unknown
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Update, 7 p.m. The Florida Highway Patrol has stamped this call cleared. The clearance time on the board reads 6.55 p.m., forty seven minutes after the crash was logged. The remarks field never moved off UNKNOWN ROADBLOCK, so the patrol closed the incident without ever publishing what, if anything, had been blocked. The rest of this item stands as written while the scene was open.
The Florida Highway Patrol had an open crash on Interstate 75 northbound at mile marker 131 in Fort Myers, and one of its own patrol cars was in it.
The state dispatch board logged the incident at 6.08 p.m. and stamped a trooper on scene at 6.15 p.m. As of 6.16 p.m. the clearance column was still empty and the scene was open on the record. The remarks field read UNKNOWN ROADBLOCK.
That last part was the part drivers needed. UNKNOWN ROADBLOCK is the patrol saying it has not established what is blocked, not that nothing is. It was not an all clear, and it was equally not a statement that a lane was shut. Nothing was published either way. For anyone heading north through Fort Myers in the evening peak, the practical position was a live scene at mile marker 131 with no word on which lanes it sat in.
The board gave the location as I-75 NB [MM131] x[MM131] [FORT MYERS], with coordinates of 26.5492 north and 81.7948 west. Run against OpenStreetMap, that point lands on Interstate 75 inside Fort Myers in Lee County, in the 33966 postcode by the Botanica Lakes and Arborwood neighbourhoods. No interchange is named here, because neither the patrol nor the map data names one and this desk is not going to supply a name from memory.
The classification is the patrol's own. Patrol Car Crash is how the agency labels an incident involving one of its vehicles, and it is a description of what kind of vehicle was in it, nothing more. It carries no finding about fault, no finding about injury, and no finding about anyone's conduct. Nobody has been named, no other vehicle has been described, and the board publishes no account of how the crash happened.
Two other Lee and Collier rows were standing on the same board at 6.16 p.m. Southbound near Naples, at mile marker 105 in Collier County, the patrol had an entry for debris or an object in the roadway, logged in the same minute as the Fort Myers crash. Its remarks field was blank and neither an arrival nor a clearance had been recorded, so no lane claim was published for that one either. It has since come off the board.
Separately, and this one is meant to be passed on, the patrol is circulating a Silver Alert for an endangered adult in Lee County. It is asking drivers to look out for a grey 2020 Lexus RX carrying the Florida tag WDE187. No time is given for it here. The board prints a twelve hour clock with no morning or afternoon marker, this desk has no independent record that fixes the half of the day for that row, and a guessed time on a missing person alert is worse than none.
One standing limit applies to all of it. This board covers state roads, meaning the interstate, the United States highways and the state routes. County and city streets are sheriff calls and do not appear on it at all. An empty board for Lee or Collier means there is no state road incident posted, and never that there is no incident.
