SIDNEY, MONT.: Politicians are quick to extol the virtues of domestic oil drilling while ignoring the trade-offs. Here in this fast-developing Western oil patch, the gritty side of America’s new oil boom is on display with rising crime, a slain schoolteacher, rents that have tripled and public resources stretched thin.
That’s just the half of it. Some area high schools are at historic low attendance levels, students dropping out to work the oil fields. Menial service jobs go unfilled despite high wages, and most everyone worries that the boom is transforming small-town values into something new and unpredictable.
“It’s just happened so fast, and many small communities just didn’t have time to plan,” said Mike Coryell, executive director of the Area Economic Development Council of Miles City, Mont., a town just south of the oil boom that struggles with spillover effects. “The impacts hit, but you don’t have the resources to attack it.”
Deep below the surface of the earth here are large quantities of crude oil trapped under rock that could make the United States less dependent on foreign oil if extracted. The Bakken formation, some 200,000 square miles of it, stretches across North Dakota, Montana, Native American reservations and parts of Canada’s Saskatchewan province.
The area saw a short-lived boom in the 1980s, but technology back then allowed only vertical drilling. Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling, known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” have unleashed a new boom that many expect to last decades. Eastern Ohio has become another drilling target in a formation called the Marcellus shale.
Here, signs of the boom abound. Natural gas is flared in the middle of sugar-beet farms and on prairie ranches that look like the set of old TV Westerns. Just across the North Dakota line, oil rigs dot a landscape where President Theodore Roosevelt lived out his final years, and where explorers Lewis and Clark famously rendezvoused at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers.
Major change
“We’re glad we have an area that’s booming … but it has totally ruined the quality of life around here,” said Kerry Finsaas, 60, walking her land, which abuts an expanded rail terminal near Trenton, N.D. “I’d say life as we knew it here is gone.”
After 34 years on her land, Finsaas and her husband, Darrell, today look out the kitchen window at a natural gas flare a few hundred feet away. Crude oil is pumped into rail tank cars that stretch in front of their house almost as far as the eye can see. Nearby irrigation ditches adjacent to a new open-air disposal pond reek of sewage.
“We don’t need a night light,” Finsaas said sarcastically.
From Miles City, where Coryell struggles to keep pace with growth, it’s almost 50 miles to Sidney, Montana’s oil hub, and roughly 120 miles to Williston, N.D., the heart of the region’s oil boom. Rents have risen so high in both places that workers now commute there from, and displaced families migrate to, Miles City.
Coryell’s office is helping to secure funding for a new jail. That’s not the traditional work of economic development officials, but Miles City, like other area small towns, is burdened by rising crime. Parts of its current jail date to 1904.
Drugs, murder
Impacts include sugar-beet farmers on tractors competing for space on tight two-lane highways with rumbling rigs that rush sand, water and heavy machinery to drill sites. Drunken driving arrests are way up, and police report seizures of uncommon illicit drugs.
“Heroin is starting to come back. The drug activity has really changed in this region,” said Doug Colombik, the Miles City police chief.
In early January, schoolteacher Sherry Arnold went for a morning jog in Sidney and never returned.
Her remains were found months later across the state line near Williston. Police said the 43-year-old cancer survivor was kidnapped and killed. Two Colorado men who came to the area in search of work in the oil fields are charged in her death.
Almost to a person, everyone interviewed in the region complained they no longer recognize people in the grocery store, and that they now must lock their doors. A large town here is home to fewer than 6,000 people, and leaving doors unlocked and keys in the car is the very definition of small-town life.
“I think whenever you don’t know people, you become suspicious of them. You just have to remember that not all strangers are bad,” said Maj. Robert Burnison, Sidney’s assistant police chief. “I tell people that, and to be aware of their surroundings … just be cautious. You don’t have to be afraid.”
While most oil workers have clean records, some arrive with outstanding arrest warrants. And others are criminals taking advantage of laws that allow extradition only from contiguous states. Authorities in Montana get stuck with criminals who have arrest warrants but cannot be extradited.
Alcohol, strip clubs
Oil workers are young men paid handsome sums. There’s little to do in small rural towns with those sums but frivol it away on alcohol and electronic casinos. Some workers dispose of their earnings at Whispers, one of Williston’s two seedy strip bars.
There, young men slug down liquor, drop loud F-bombs and jostle over billiards. Some disappear with dancers into rooms guarded by burly, tattooed, pierced men who work in the club.
Sky-high rents
For many workers coming to the Bakken region, they quickly find they can’t afford to live here.
“The city is being terribly saturated with individuals looking for work,” said Cal Westerhof, a missionary from Dallas whose Fellowship Baptist Church in Sidney offers free showers, food donations and low-cost rentals for displaced workers.
Rents have more than doubled all over the oil region. People rent out basements, rooms and even their front yards for trailers. Makeshift RV parks have cropped up everywhere and charge $400 a week or more. That’s about what an apartment rented for monthly before the boom began.
“Even with a good-paying job, how do you afford to pay the rent? Groceries have gone horribly high … living on a daily basis here is high,” said Candy Markwald, who helps run the Richland County Food Bank in Sidney.