The Florida Highway Patrol has reopened the right lane of Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 52 on Alligator Alley in Collier County, thirteen minutes after a crash shut it, and a second crash a mile ahead is still open
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The right lane of Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 52, on the Alligator Alley stretch in Collier County, is open again after a crash closed it for thirteen minutes this afternoon.
The Florida Highway Patrol logged the call at 2.39 p.m. and updated the record at 2.43 p.m. with the right southbound lane recorded as blocked. It stamped the call clear at 2.52 p.m. At 3 p.m. the entry's remarks read that the roadway is clear.
This site published on the closure while it was still in force, from three reads of the state board that each showed the lane shut and no clearance stamp. The clearance appeared on the next read. Both states are recorded here rather than one quietly replacing the other.
The location is why a thirteen minute lane closure is worth recording at all. Mile marker 52 sits in the long gap between the State Road 29 interchange at exit 80 and the Snake Road interchange at exit 49, and there is no interchange between the two. A southbound driver at mile marker 52 has passed State Road 29 some twenty eight miles back and has about three miles to run before Snake Road, with no way off the road in between and no parallel route across the Big Cypress National Preserve. A queue that forms on that stretch takes time to drain after the lane reopens, so slow traffic behind the scene can outlast the clearance stamp by a good margin.
A second crash is still open. It was logged three minutes after the first, at 2.42 p.m., a mile ahead at mile marker 51 on the same southbound side. The Highway Patrol typed it as a crash with injuries and its remarks record no roadblock. Unlike the first call it carried no clearance stamp on any read in this run, including the one at 3 p.m. That is all that can be said about it. These are two separate entries about a mile apart, and nothing here should be read as saying that one caused the other.
Nothing else has been made public. No agency has released a vehicle count, an injury count, a name or a cause for either crash. A clearance stamp is a dispatch status about the roadway and says nothing about anyone's condition. The Highway Patrol has published no statement on either and neither has the Collier County Sheriff's Office. Nobody has been accused of anything.
No local outlet appears to have carried either one. Gulf Coast News read normally from this desk and its front page carries no Alligator Alley item, its only Interstate 75 story being the Bonita Beach Road on-ramp van fire this site covered separately earlier today. WINK News could not be checked in this run because its feed returned nothing parseable, so it is unchecked rather than silent.
The usual jurisdiction limit applies. The Highway Patrol board carries state roads. It does not carry Collier County streets, so those are unreported rather than confirmed clear.
There is no active National Weather Service alert for Collier County, so no weather condition was in effect on that road and none is offered as a cause.
