The crash the Florida Highway Patrol had open on Interstate 75 northbound at the Palm Beach Boulevard interchange in Fort Myers carries a clearance stamp of 8.01 on Sunday evening, and the entry has since dropped off the state dispatch board altogether
The Florida Highway Patrol has stamped a clearance time on the crash it had open on Interstate 75 northbound at the Palm Beach Boulevard interchange in Fort Myers, and the entry has since dropped off its dispatch board altogether.
The board logged the incident at 7.32 p.m. at mile marker 141, in Lee County, northbound. A third timestamp reading 8.01 p.m. was on the row by 8.04. Two direct readings of the board taken at 8.06 p.m. do not carry the row at all, and both returned a populated board of forty seven entries statewide and the same three remaining entries for Lee and Collier, so this is the one row clearing rather than a parse failure or a board that has gone empty.
One field never moved on the way out, and it is worth stating plainly rather than reading past. The remarks column said the roadblock status was unknown when the entry appeared, and it still said so on the last reading that held it. The Highway Patrol did not at any point publish whether those lanes were blocked. What the record holds now is a clearance stamp and an absent row, and that is a statement about a dispatch entry rather than an account of what happened on the road.
The type field records a vehicle crash and does not record injuries, and the same board uses a separate wording when there are injuries, so nothing is claimed here about casualties in either direction. No agency has released a name, an injury count, a vehicle count or a cause. An entry leaving that board is not a report that anyone is unharmed.
The times on that board print on a twelve hour clock with no morning or afternoon marker, so the field alone cannot say which half of the day it belongs to. This desk's own monitor of the same board settles it at both ends. It polls every five minutes and stamps each reading in universal time. The first reading that held this entry was taken at thirty nine minutes past seven in the evening, Eastern, seven minutes after the dispatch. The reading taken at 7.59 p.m. still carried an empty clearance column, and the reading taken at 8.04 p.m. is the first that carried the 8.01 stamp, which places the clearance inside those five minutes and matches what the row prints.
Where this was matters more than the mile marker does. The coordinates the board published for the incident sit about ninety metres from the Exit 141 interchange, which carries State Road 80, Palm Beach Boulevard. A reverse geocode of the same coordinates places the point on the interstate in the Tice area, east of Fort Myers and south of the Caloosahatchee, which is why this is carried as Fort Myers and not as North Fort Myers.
Northbound, the next way off after 141 is Exit 143, about a mile and a half further on. The last one behind is Exit 139. For the half hour or so the entry stood, a driver already past 139 and heading north had committed to that stretch, and the interchange the crash was sitting on was the one that would otherwise have been the way out of it.
Nothing is blocking a road in either county now. A southbound crash at mile marker 135, also in Fort Myers, carries its own clearance stamp and the remark that there is no roadblock. The only other entries for Lee or Collier are the two standing construction closures on Collier Boulevard at Exit 101 in Naples, one taking two right lanes off the southbound exit and one taking the left lane off the northbound.
No local newsroom has this incident. The Gulf Coast News traffic page was read in full this evening and carries nothing on it, WINK News rate limited this desk out of its site, and the record here is the state's own dispatch board and this desk's timed readings of it.
That board covers state roads. It does not cover Lee County roads or City of Fort Myers streets, so a quiet board for those is silence and not an all clear.
