As general manager of Frog Holler Produce, a Detroit company that operates a 25-truck fleet that delivers fresh produce daily to clients across the state, Clay Verkaik routinely deals with traffic accidents, breakdowns, and other road emergencies.
He wasn’t prepared, however, for what happened last spring when one of the company’s brand-new semitractor-trailer trucks was involved in an early morning two-vehicle accident on I-75, near downtown Detroit.
Days after the accident he received a bill for $18,073 from Goch & Sons Towing Inc. in Detroit, one of the companies the Michigan State Police Department’s troopers call to clear the scenes of traffic accidents on area interstate freeways.
“I was just dumbfounded. We’ve had trucks towed before that flipped over on the highway where there was gas or oil spilled, and we never experienced anything like this,” Verkaik says. “We’ve had trucks that rolled, loaded with produce, that looked like a bomb went off — produce exploded everywhere over the highway — and our charges weren’t this high.”
Verkaik says when he went to the tow truck company’s office to check on the truck and get an explanation of the charges on the bill, he couldn’t talk to anyone in person. Instead of an office, he says he walked into a small space, about 3 feet by 3 feet, with a receptionist behind a one-way mirror.
“You don’t see who you’re talking to. I never got face-to-face with anybody,” he says. “I never saw the receptionist, as she was behind the mirror.”
Verkaik says he grudgingly paid the bill because he had to recover the truck. The person behind the glass who took his credit card promised the sales manager would call him to go over the itemized charges. He says about a week later someone finally called and
said the bill was what it was.
Verkaik compared that incident to one involving another company truck that ran off the road in the Oxford area two years ago. That truck ended up in a drainage ditch.
“The nose of the truck was submerged about 5 or 6 feet deep. The fuel tanks were underwater and it took two large tow trucks to get our truck out,” Verkaik says. “It took seven-and-a-half hours to get that truck out of that ditch and towed away.”
A towing service based in Lake Orion charged $6,000; a price Verkaik says was fair for the time and effort spent in getting the truck out of the ditch.
Public ire toward towing companies has always been high, but recent weather events in the Detroit area and rising inflation have exacerbated patience levels.
in the accident was declared a total wreck.
Record-high flooding in June 2021 shut down sections of nearly all metro Detroit freeways, leaving thousands of vehicles submerged and in need of rescue. More flooding the past two summers continued to aggravate those traditional tensions between motorists and tow truck companies.
Verkaik’s sticker shock over the Goch & Sons tow bill is similar to that experienced by operators of GM Freight Inc., a Taylor based family-owned trucking serviceThe accident involving the Frog Holler truck happened at 4:30 a.m. on April 7, 2023. The brand-new
vehicle, a Hino L Series semitractor-trailer, had 700 miles on the odometer when it collided with a Nissan Altima sedan. Both vehicles were changing lanes to get to the center lane when they collided on I-75 near downtown Detroit.
The impact of the truck hitting the back end of the smaller vehicle bashed the Altima into the cement lane divider. Neither driver was hurt, but the car was heavily damaged. At first glance the truck seemed to have sustained damage only on the right front, the right tire, and a wheel.
The driver initially thought damage to the truck was minor. Neither the driver nor Verkaik were aware of the details of the four-hour operation to remove the box truck and the car, and the extensive cleanup required to reopen the expressway.
Goch’s bill to Frog Holler included $2,500 for a street sweeper, four hazmat technicians for $2,100, $3,000 for a heavy-duty rotator truck, $1,575 for three other service trucks, $2,550 for three flatbeds, and $1,015 for 29 buckets of material to dry and remove
liquid contaminants from the roadway. The truck was towed less than 10 miles.
The bill the Altima driver ultimately paid was $1,217, most of which was for storage after he left his car on Goch’s lot for 21 days after the accident.
Mike Smith, general manager at Goch & Sons, says he understands why owners like Verkaik and others are upset over costs, especially truck accidents.
“I can see both sides. People are taken back by the cleanup costs when they get into these truck accidents,” he says. “It’s not the towing that cost the money, it’s the cleanup and the equipment, and the specialized personnel we have to send out there. The cost of the equipment we had on this job was over $2 million.”
Smith says to qualify for the state police’s contract list of tow companies they assign to certain sections of area expressways, a company must have hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and manpower in that area on standby to respond immediately, any
time of day or night, to a call to clear an accident.
“They want companies that can throw people at it immediately so the rest of us can enjoy a freeway that moves,” he explains. “They want you to throw everything and the kitchen sink to get this road open, and at 4:30 in the morning, they were putting some pressure on our guys to get that road open before rush hour.”
The contract with the state police dictates “fast response time and available equipment,” Smith says.
“If the police order your car towed, it costs you more than a regular tow because we must have a certain number of tow trucks standing by for an emergency call,” he explains. “Unfortunately, that’s part of the price that’s built into it.”
The Frog Holler accident scene was complicated because the truck traveled nearly 1,000 feet before stopping after impact with the car, he says.
“It was a big accident. He hit the curb and took off pieces of the cement with the truck. There’s cement damage to the highway. He took down a traffic sign.
The impact was so severe it shifted the (trailer) box off the frame of the truck,” Smith points out, using pictures Goch team members took at the scene.
The most expensive charge on the Frog Holler bill was the $3,000 for the heavy-duty rotator truck used to lift and secure the trailer box back onto the frame. This truck is specially designed for difficult roadside truck accidents. It has a 360-degree rotating arm
capable of lifting 70 tons of weight 30 feet up.
Fluids from the truck from the point of the impact ran down a gutter across a ramp entrance to where the truck was parked. Because Verkaik says the diesel fuel tanks were intact on the truck, Smith surmises the fluid on the roadway was from a broken radiator and an oil pan that might have been damaged when the truck ran over roadway cement.
“It’s not like the truck stopped where the impact was; he kept going until he parked it and more (fluid) spilled out. You can see in the pictures there’s a ton of Floor-Dry under the truck,” Smith says.
The truck’s frame was bent, which meant it could no longer transport a trailer. The $141,000 truck was declared a total wreck, useful only for scrap parts.
Smith says the unusual office layout at the Goch yard, where female employees deal with vehicle owners from behind a one-way mirror, is a security measure to protect the workers.
“We tow vehicles from crime scenes, we have angry people whose cars were towed coming in here, and we don’t want our people coming face-to-face with them at a Walmart,” he says.
One of the most publicized complaints against Goch & Sons was filed with the Detroit City Council, which led to an October 2022 meeting by the activist group New Era Detroit and rapper Trick Trick.
Isiah Williams of New Era said they confronted and videotaped a Goch tow truck driver before he could hook and illegally tow a woman’s car, minutes after she parked in an apartment space at the Detroit
Medical Center. The tow would have occurred before a 15-minute grace period had expired.
In a statement to the council, Goch denied the allegation and said their driver was so threatened by the activists he called the Detroit Police Department.
Goch included a statement from apartment management praising the professional service the tow company provides its residents. At that time, City Council President Mary Sheffield
was withholding approval for a pending $187,500 City towing contract with Goch. Two months later, Sheffield killed the contract.
Danny Wimmer, press secretary to Attorney General Dana Nessel, says the office’s Consumer Protection Division has received 40 customer complaints against Goch & Sons since 2012, with 29 filed after January 2021.
None resulted in formal investigations or action by the attorney general’s office, he says. He was unable to compare the number of complaints against Goch with
other tow companies because his office’s internal tracking system doesn’t sort complaints in a way that makes that possible.
Mike Shaw, a first lieutenant at the Michigan State Police Department, says tow companies submit proposals to work crash sites in certain sections of area freeways and are selected if their tow yard is located in that area and if the company has equipment, including the heavy-duty rotator trucks that can tow semi-trailers. There are no contracts involved, he says.
The department’s Motor Carrier Division is responsible for vetting applicants. That process, however, habeen tied up in court for three years until recently. The state police are now in the process of compiling a current list of eligible tow companies, Shaw says.
“The attorney general investigated the complaints. We charged the rates set by the state police,” Smith says. “They looked at all the cases and didn’t find one case where we overcharged anyone. We had the pictures and documentation for every vehicle.”
Reflecting on what happened with Frog Holler’s truck last spring, Verkaik says he has since instituted new actions and procedures. “We now will document everything following an accident, and every truck has a list of towing companies to call that we trust,” he says. “We don’t want to be at the mercy of anyone.”
