Susan Sink

I’m not sure what my friend Doug thought of the whole thing, but I really was much more excited as we approached Watford City than I was in the Badlands. For the past year I’ve been thinking about, reading about, and consuming media about the oil boom and the Bakken Shale Oil Fields of northwestern North Dakota.

I don’t know why, but I was surprised to find t-shirts with oil pump jacks on them in Medora, a tourist town whose sole purpose is providing tourist opportunities and food and a big ole Branson-style thing called the Medora Musical (an epic tale in song and dance of the story of Theodore Roosevelt who brought the National Parks to ND and of businessman Harold Schafer, inventor of Mr. Bubble, who brought the musical to Medora).

In some places, like signal fires from “The Iliad,” you could see natural gas flares and pump jacks out to the horizon. But most places you’d hardly know a boom was going on.

I am not a fan of fracking for oil. It seems quite clear that the amount of ecological damage being caused by this process is severe. The process involves pumping massive amounts of sand and chemicals and water horizontally into the ground to release the oil. In addition to oil, natural gas is also released. Because there are no pipelines to transport the natural gas, it is all burned off, or “flared,” in North Dakota.

There is extensive evidence that fracking ruins groundwater and has contaminated the water supplies of people living on or near land that has been drilled. If you want to see the most nightmarish vision of this industry, watch the documentary Gasland. 

Hôtel barbecue and new apartments across the street. Studio apartments typically started at $2,000/month.

In North Dakota, the atmosphere around the boom, which has been going on for six years now, is buoyant. In the brand new hotel (one month old) in Watford City, everything was fancy and clean and new and the people staying there were quiet and happy. The woman behind the counter had been in town a few months, and found her job and a place to live in four days. She came from North Carolina. We met other women (waitresses, gas attendants, hotel clerks) who had arrived from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arkansas, one as early as 2013 but most in the past year.

Some of them had plans: one was working for the park district, too, and could transfer to another national park after a year’s service. Another and her husband had just put down money on some land back home. A third was paying down debts and getting valuable experience she hoped would help her get a job back home. We asked everyone three questions: “Where are you from? When did you get here? Are you going to stay?” No one was going to stay.

One of several rows of trailers in a Watford City “man camp.”

The oil boom is actually slowing due to low oil prices, with fewer wells being drilled. However, the construction industry is just catching up, so there’s still plenty of work. And plenty of “man camps,” trailer parks with rows of trailers, some with windows and some without, and propane tanks out back.

A grim looking man camp

In Williston itself, you see layers of booms. This is the third one, though by far the largest. We talked to a woman, Joanne, who lived in old housing stock across from a cemetery that had recently been expanded. She moved there in 1956 and her grandfather had homesteaded nearby. The family still owned the 160 acre homestead, where her husband was that morning hanging out on his “hobby farm.” They also still held (I asked), the mineral rights.

A platform with active drilling.

One of the issues in that part of North Dakota is that the people who work and even own the land might not own the mineral rights. You find older families who have long since moved to Florida or the Twin Cities drilling on land they don’t farm. And because of this, there is not the same commitment or awareness of the degradation of the land. There is also the jubilation that comes with one’s long hoped-for claim coming in. This is what those early settlers hoped for when they moved out to the dry grasslands and found that you couldn’t make enough money farming.

Joanne’s house in Williston.

Joanne wasn’t happy about the way the boom has affected Williston. People have had to move because they couldn’t afford rent. And she said it’s ruined little towns like Epping, where one of her sons lives, because of the oil trains coming in and out on the railroad all the time and the rapid development It is nearly impossible to see the remnant of Watford City. All I could find was the grain elevator. In Williston the elevator is just down the tracks from a new large oil storage facility.

I’m glad we saw it– including the torn up streets of downtown that the coffee shop owner said they’ve been working on for four months, just pouring the concrete. It’s a mess. And it will be interesting to see what’s there once the man camps are dissembled and the pump jacks are going mostly unattended.