They have done that in my state as well. Interestingly enough there was an old local boy who used a 1960's GMC truck in his towing business until his death in the early 90s. He was a one man operation and lived in a "trailer" in his "tow yard", it wasn't a pretty picture at all.
1 thing there though, for those guys that still have those old dinosaur units. If they bring out their more modern equipment and start the job and then realize they need another truck for support, like say a catch truck. Some don't realize, when you upright a loaded trailer, on the bounce, it can go all the way over the way, ORRRRRRRRR drop to fast causing a load shift and then the freight blows out the side walls of the trailer and now you have a load of freight on the freeway adding 3-5 more hours of clean up. So if they want to bring in their dinosaur to use as a support truck or catch truck to ease the trailer down as it comes over, noone ever has an issue with that. Or they have the option to call another company to come in with their truck or trucks to assist in recovery efforts, so long as it's done in a timely fashion. The big reason for modern equipment is time. Not only to get highways open faster, but ripping off the customers and insurance companies because of logging longer times for recovery and clean up. So only the best companies with best trained help and equipment are wanted on the law enforcement calls. Anyone have an idea what an upright of a semi costs? Pretty much, $10,000 is a bare minimum and they can go up as high as $40,000 if you start talking about haz mat loads and such. The last load of fruit I worked on carrying 3 skid steers to the crash site, 2 for loading the fruilt into roll off dumpsters and 1 for scrubbing the pavement and then the fire dept hosed that down. Looked like nothing happened when were done. About 6 hours which was quick. But we had 2 heavy units, and 2 support trucks being the rollbacks, 3 skid steers and about 7 men and the boss and the scene director for a total of 8, the bill was $28,000. Oh and add the 2 drivers in the roll off trucks that were dropping roll offs and hauling them off and then bringing another back after they dropped at the dump. So that was also included in the $28,000 we billed. We had to pay the roll off company, IIRC, the roll off bill we paid on that one was $3500.
