Williston ND - Oil Prosperity Was Going To Endure, But It Ended Up Another Deflated Boomtown
Life in a modern boomtown is living on the frontier but with a smartphone. “Capitalism on crack” is the way historian Clay Jenkinson referred to it – everyone taking what they can get, as fast as they can. I spent nearly a year in an oil boomtown: from summer of 2013 to winter of 2014, I worked in the Bakken oil patch out of Williston, North Dakota. At the time, politicians, geologists, and much of the national media claimed the town would be booming for decades to come. They were all wrong.
North Dakota began to boom in the midst of America’s forever wars, when technological advancement in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing made a formerly impenetrable seam of crude oil suddenly recoverable. Williston, a rural community in an Indian service area with ties to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, found its population ballooning. Most of those coming to town were men looking for work. Much of the hiring by oilfield companies was pitched toward veterans, but in the wake of the 2008 crash, anyone who could swing a hammer had a shot at landing a job. Williston was swamped by out-of-work carpenters, plumbers and contractors of every stripe.
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I landed a job at a crane rigger and swamper for a company that moved oil rigs. I feel stumped every time I attempt to find an adjective that captures how hard the work was. An average day in the patch runs between 12 and 14 hours, much of it back breaking. While many oilfield jobs required two weeks on and two weeks off, I was on call every day. On days off, I sometimes didn’t leave the bed, just lay there staring up at the ceiling, the worry in my belly tightening like a metal coil, waiting for a call from dispatch saying “You’re headed out on the gin truck tomorrow, Magic.” My longest work day was 17 and a half hours. The longest week I recorded working was 95 and a half hours. I once worked 172 hours over the course of 14 days. To the men I worked with, this was unexceptional.
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My move was well timed. Despite the optimistic projections that the state would add over 13,000 jobs in 2014, and nearly 30,000 by 2020, the number of active drilling wells in North Dakota dropped from a high of 195 to a low of 64 when the price of oil plummeted from $107.95 a barrel in June 2014 to $44.08 a barrel seven months later. Companies laid off workers, migrants fled, and support businesses shuttered. North Dakota went bust. Had I decided to stay, I would have been out of a job within a year regardless. It is impossible to say how many individuals found financial success during Williston’s boom. I know I didn’t. I left town with less cash than I’d arrived with. Admitting that makes me feel dumb, but I’m hardly the only one. Most people I met during the boom could be described as poor or lower middle class. Many of us bought nicer stuff during those years, and some of us I know used the money they made to transition into more stable work. That said, it would be hard for me to name a person who somehow changed their station in life, who used the boom to grab a higher rung on the ladder of the American dream. I am absolutely certain however that, as it is apparently impossible for them not to in our current economic system, that the rich got richer.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/06/boomtown-oil-williston-north-dakota
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