WATFORD CITY, ND (AP) – First came the necks and other oil field workers, almost all men.
Attracted by steady wages as the nation emerged from the Great Recession, they filled the few rooms of the McKenzie County motel and began sleeping in cars, tents, trailers, everything that would hide from the cold wind blowing through the North Dakota prairie. Once empty, the dirt roads were covered with tanker trucks. Crime rates rose.
Soon everything changed again: the spouses and children of the workers arrived. The classrooms swelled. Apartment buildings appeared next to oil rigs. And the newcomers made this community of the Northern Plains their own.
Growth made McKenzie the fastest-growing county in the nation over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau. It swept away like a dust devil that twisted itself, shattering rural innocence of a region known for inhospitable winters and long summer days perfect for growing crops. But it also brought youth, diversity and better wages, giving life to sleepy cities that had been losing population since the 1930s.
Dana Amon, who grew up in a double-width trailer on a farm on the edge of County County, Watford, remembers riding her horse through fields now dotted with stretches of modest, lighted homes at night. by flares of nearby oil wells.
“Our little town just exploded through the seams,” he said.
STRUGGLES AND STRAWBERRIES
Since the boom began in 2010, work in McKenzie County has been going on with the changing fortune of oil. Crude prices peaked last decade at more than $ 130 a barrel, fell below $ 40 and bounced back before falling again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
McKenzie continued to grow.
The town of Watford, perched on a lighthouse, its horizon defined by a pair of grain elevators, spilled over the surrounding farmland. The flat, largely barren landscape of Amon’s childhood now features mile-by-mile of labor camps, shopping malls, subdivisions, hotels, trucks, and warehouses.
When fights became frequent in main street bars and deadly havoc was common on the roads, people like Amon began to close their doors at night.
Ten years later, the frenzy has settled. Locals and newcomers who remained cautious relaxed. Along the way, lives were brought together through school events, religious services and on the sidelines of youth football games.
“I tell the locals,‘ If you take me outside, I’m not leaving. It’s my city, ”said Yolanda Rojas, a native of Tucson, Arizona, who followed her husband to McKenzie County with her five children the year after she got a job in the oil fields.
From 2010 to 2014, the amount of crude produced in the county grew by 1,800%. By the end of the decade, census figures show that its population doubled, to 14,704 residents.
Rojas and her husband, Ruben Vega, saved enough money to open a Mexican restaurant in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. The company was shaking up failure when Rojas contacted the community on social media. The people of Watford City gathered to help, regularly ordering takeaway food for the family.
Many of the customers were Hispanic and unknown to Rojas. Only when the census data were published did it become known that the number of Spaniards multiplied by ten during the decade, a strong cultural change for a community long dominated by farmers of northern European origin.
Hispanics now make up about 10 percent of the population, a share roughly equal to the county’s American Indians, which includes part of the Fort Berthold Reserve. The three tribes of the reserve: the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara – trace their roots in the area long before the first European settlers.
“A LARGE FAMILY”
Oil was first discovered in McKenzie County in the 1950s, but it was the industry’s fracking revolution that once opened up inaccessible oil reserves and transformed North Dakota into a global energy player. According to government estimates, tens of billions of barrels of oil have yet to be mined and new wells continue to be drilled.
County officials say growth is far from over. School enrollment has tripled over the past decade and is expected to double again in 2030.
Oil pumps pumping oil from the ground sprinkle the county’s 7,400-square-mile landscape. Bordered by the Yellowstone River to the north, Lake Sakakawea to the east and Montana to the west, McKenzie is larger than Delaware.
Howdy Lawlar, who chairs the McKenzie County Commission and whose family has grown wheat and raised cattle northwest of Watford City for five generations, recalled the widespread frustration among farmers as thousands of oil trucks they obstructed roads not designed for this traffic.
Leaving the farm and trying to turn left towards Watford City, Lawlar was able to wait an hour to find a traffic gap.
Bypasses were built to facilitate congestion. Pipes were introduced to replace the tanker trucks. At the height of the boom, nearly 4,000 trucks a day were being dragged through Watford City. Recent records added just over 320 trucks a day.
More police were hired to maintain order and new schools were built to remove students from temporary trailers.
“I feel like we’re becoming a big extended family,” Lawlar said. “Is good”.
But as most families age, it has become younger, with an average age of 30 compared to 39 in 2010. It is also more prosperous, with an average household income increasing by 61%. up to nearly $ 78,000, according to census data.
The money attracted JT Smith, a 31-year-old from the Fort Worth, Texas area, who took an oil spot in McKenzie County six years ago. His parents had moved to North Dakota to work in oil several years earlier. At first, he found the region desolate and unattractive.
Smith returned to Texas, where his wife and two children had stayed, swearing he would never return.
STAYING FOR THE COMMUNITY
A few years later, he was offered another job offer in North Dakota, so he decided to try again. This time he brought his family and the rhythms of their lives have become comfortable.
JT Smith leaves before nightfall to work as an oil field safety consultant, boarding a white company pill and joining a multitude of nearly identical pellets that are made each morning at drilling rigs, gas processing plants and pipeline construction projects in western North Dakota.
An hour later, the Smiths ’ten-year-old son gets on a school bus that falls with dozens of other people driving students to a bright new elementary and high school complex on the outskirts of town.
Smith and his wife, Virginia, have been deeply involved in the church of the Assembly of God, which in recent years has doubled in size to 400 members. Her children have become friends through a mixed martial arts gym.
Now, when the Smiths go to the grocery store, they will meet half a dozen friends. It is one of many visions of the lingering charm of small towns.
“You’ve been here for a month and everyone knows you,” Virginia Smith said.
Despite the drastic changes of the last decade, the open landscape around Watford City retains a sense of remoteness.
While Lawlar, the chairman of the county commission, was recently working to replace a barbed wire fence that bordered wheat fields that stretched to the horizon, the only sign of industry was that occasionally a truck he murmured on a distant road.
The grasshoppers emerged in front of Lawlar as he walked silently down the fence line. His farmer, Charlie Lewis, boarded a Bobcat that they used to push the steel fences into the dry land.
Lewis came to work in the oil field, and then worked at Lawlar during a drop in crude oil prices. He plans to make this place his home and start a family.
“People come for work and stay for the community,” Lewis said. “The only time I think about coming back is when it’s been 40 years.”
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