The Florida Highway Patrol has an injury crash open on Palm Beach Boulevard at Davis Boulevard in Fort Myers this Saturday morning, and its own board does not say whether the road is blocked, only that the roadblock status there is unknown
The Florida Highway Patrol has a crash open on Palm Beach Boulevard at Davis Boulevard in Fort Myers, logged as involving injuries, and the state dispatch board was still carrying it with no clearance stamp when this desk read it four times before six o'clock this Saturday morning.
The board logged the entry at 5.32 a.m. Its type reads vehicle crash with injuries. Its remarks field reads that the roadblock status in the area is unknown.
That wording matters and it is worth being plain about it. On this board the remarks field is where the road condition is stated in words, and on other entries it says exactly that a lane is blocked, or that there is no roadblock, or that the roadway is clear. Here it says the status is unknown. So the Highway Patrol has not published that the road is shut, and it has not published that the road is open.
Neither of the two columns that fill in when a call moves on carries anything against the entry, on any of the four readings. The board stamps no expected clearance time.
The coordinates the board publishes for it are latitude 26.70359, longitude minus 81.75140.
A second Lee County entry appeared while this desk was reading. At 5.46 a.m. the board logged a crash on Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 148 in North Fort Myers, and that entry carries no remarks at all, which is to say the board states nothing about the condition of the road there. It carries no clearance stamp either.
The time of day is fixed by this desk's own watcher rather than by the board. The board prints its times on a twelve hour clock with no morning or afternoon marker, so an entry reading 05:32:41 cannot state its own half of the day. The watcher polls the same board every five minutes and stamps each capture in UTC. Its cycle at 5.34 a.m. Eastern carried nothing new and its cycle at 5.39 a.m. is the first that carried this row, which places the entry going up on the board between those two, and the reads themselves were all taken before six in the morning.
Almost nothing else about either crash is established. No agency has released a vehicle count, an injury count, a name, a vehicle type or a cause. The Highway Patrol has published no statement on either and neither has the Lee County Sheriff's Office. Nobody has been accused of anything. The word injuries in the first entry is the state's classification of the call and not an account of anyone's condition.
The third Lee County entry on the same board is already finished with. A crash on Interstate 75 southbound at mile marker 123 in Estero was logged at 2.38 a.m., stamped at 2.49 a.m. and carries remarks reading no roadblock. No Collier County entry appeared on any of the four readings.
No weather condition is in effect on these roads. The National Weather Service active alert feed carried three alerts for the whole of Florida when it was read this morning, all rip current statements on the Atlantic coast, and nothing touching Lee or Collier. One of them covers coastal Palm Beach County, which is on the Atlantic side of the state and is unrelated to Palm Beach Boulevard in Fort Myers.
No local newsroom has either entry at the hour of writing. WINK News has published nothing since 8.51 last night and the Gulf Coast News traffic page carries neither incident. That is unremarkable for something logged before six on a Saturday, and it is why this item rests on the state board rather than on an outlet report.
One standing caution applies. The Highway Patrol board covers state roads, meaning the interstate, US 41 and the state routes. County and city streets are sheriff and city calls and never appear on it, so an otherwise quiet board says nothing at all about the surface streets a driver would use to get around either of these, and those should be treated as unreported rather than confirmed clear.
