A crash blocked Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 119 in Bonita Springs just before one o'clock on Sunday morning, and the Florida Highway Patrol had the lanes back and the entry off its board within about twenty two minutes
A crash shut a southbound lane or lanes of Interstate 75 at Bonita Springs shortly before one o'clock on Sunday morning, and the Florida Highway Patrol had cleared the entry from its dispatch board about twenty two minutes later.
The board logged the incident at 12.58 a.m. at mile marker 119, in Lee County, southbound, with the remark that there was a roadblock southbound. It stamped the entry again at 1.04 a.m. and a third time at 1.19 a.m. The type field records a vehicle crash with a roadblock 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.
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. It polls every five minutes and stamps each reading in universal time, and the first reading that held this entry was taken at four minutes past one in the morning, Eastern. A dispatch at 12.58 in the afternoon could not have appeared on a board four hours before it happened.
Mile marker 119 is a consequential place to lose a lane, even briefly. Exit numbers on Interstate 75 in Florida follow the mile markers, which puts this between the Bonita Beach Road interchange at 116 and the Corkscrew Road interchange at 123.
That is the stretch that carries Naples traffic north and Fort Myers traffic south with nothing useful running alongside it. A driver already past Corkscrew heading south has Old 41 through the middle of Bonita Springs and very little else. It is the reason a twenty minute roadblock there at one in the morning is a small event and the same roadblock at eight in the morning is not.
The twenty two minutes is the life of the entry on the board rather than a published restoration time. The Highway Patrol does not post a reopening event, and none is invented here. What can be said is that the entry was logged at 12.58, was stamped for the last time at 1.19, and was gone by the time the board was read again.
That later reading was taken at twenty to seven on Sunday morning. It returned a populated board statewide and no incident at all in either Lee or Collier county.
A clean board on a Sunday morning is worth having, with one limit attached to it. That board 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.
Nothing else was working against the road overnight. There is no National Weather Service alert in effect anywhere in Lee or Collier county and no active storm in the Atlantic.
