The Florida Highway Patrol has a crash open right now at United States 41 and Bayshore Road in North Fort Myers with the right lane and the right turn lane blocked, and it is the second crash the state board has logged at that one intersection today
The Florida Highway Patrol has an active crash on its dispatch board at United States 41 and Bayshore Road in North Fort Myers, and it is the second entry the board has logged at that intersection today.
The newer entry was logged at 3.39 p.m. Its remarks, on a reading taken at 3.47 p.m., say the right lane and the right turn lane are blocked. Eight minutes earlier the same row had read only that the right lane was blocked, so the entry is being updated while the scene is worked. It carries no clearance stamp.
The older entry at the same intersection was logged at 12.28 p.m. and was still on the board at the same reading, more than three hours later. Its remarks say the northbound right turn lane is blocked on Tamiami at Bayshore and the eastbound right lane is blocked on Bayshore. It carries no clearance stamp either.
Both are typed on the board as a vehicle crash with roadblock, both are in Lee County, and both sit at coordinates about twenty metres apart at the same junction. Whether they are two separate collisions or one scene entered twice is not something the record says, and it is not asserted here.
What the board does not carry is most of what matters. There is no injury information on either entry, no count of vehicles, no description of them and no cause. No agency has published a statement on either crash that this desk could locate, and WINK News could not be read at all on this run because the site returned a rate limit error to every request. This rests on the state dispatch record alone.
Two direct readings of the board were taken four minutes apart, at 3.47 p.m. and 3.49 p.m. Eastern. Both returned a fully populated grid, 81 statewide rows on the first and 82 on the second, and both returned these same two rows for Lee and Collier counties and nothing else. That matters because a parse that returns nothing can read like a quiet afternoon rather than a failure, so the row count was checked before the county filter was believed.
The times need one note. The board prints its timestamps on a twelve hour clock with no marker for morning or afternoon, which means a row can read three thirty nine and mean either. These are afternoon. The 12.28 entry was first picked up by this desk's own five minute watcher at 12.45 p.m. Eastern, seventeen minutes after the stamp, and the 3.39 entry was first picked up at 3.34 p.m. and again at 3.42 p.m. A watcher that polls every five minutes through the night would have caught a 3.39 a.m. entry in the small hours, and it did not.
A dispatch board is a live log rather than a road status. Entries can linger after lanes reopen and can be revised minute by minute, as the newer one was. What can be said is that on a third reading taken at 3.56 p.m., against a board of 84 statewide entries and still growing, neither of these had cleared it, and the lane statuses on both still read blocked.
