North Dakota oil boom draws local workers
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Lake County’s latest unemployment rate is 10.9 percent, according to Todd Erickson, Employment Specialist at the Lake County Job Service. That compares to a national rate of 9.1 percent, Erickson added, but in eastern Montana, unemployment rates dip as low as 3.1 in McCone County and 3.8 percent in Wibaux County, both of which are close to or right on the North Dakota border, where jobs in the oil fields are paying good wages right now.
Reversing Horace Greeley’s famous quote, “Go west, young man,” many Mission Valley men and women are heading east to North Dakota and the booming oil fields.
Drywallers, plumbers, contractors, construction workers and others are all heading to Williston to get a good-paying job driving trucks, working in the oil fields or building housing for the influx of people.
The Bakken formation is “an oil-bearing strata covering parts of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan,” according to the Oil Drum website, an energy and sustainability think tank at www.theoildrum.com.
Originally production was from vertical wells, but now horizontal technology combined with hydraulic fracturing technology has caused oil production to take off. It’s predicted to produce the biggest boom since the '60s, and local economies may lose many skilled workers who flock to North Dakota for good-paying jobs. Predictions are the boom will last for about 10 years. The U.S. Geological Survey “estimated mean undiscovered volumes of 3.65 billion barrels of oil, 1.85 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas and 148 million barrels of natural gas liquids in the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin,” according to a USGS fact sheet.
The Bakken formation is thickest near Tioga, N.D., but Williston is also on the formation.
A job on an oil rig can pay as much as six figures. The starting salary for truck drivers is around $80,000. As of Oct. 28, the Williston Herald had 55 jobs in its "help wanted" classified ads and six in "heavy equipment." Some jobs are not advertised; recruiters connect with acquaintances and people new to town and hire them. Many offer signing bonuses for truck drivers with commercial driver’s licenses, but some also offer entry-level positions.
Polson area resident Larry Ashcraft has been working in the oil fields since June. He said Sidney and Culbertson are booming in Montana, but the real boom state is North Dakota, with work going on over by Stanley, Ross and Watford City. Both apartment and home construction is going on in Williston and Minot.
A retired airline pilot, Ashcraft got his commercial driver’s license to drive a belly dump truck that hauls material for the roads leading into an oil derrick and the pad on which the derrick sits. He’s lucky because his employer provides housing, a fifth-wheel camper.
Other workers in the area bring their own campers, rent a place if anything is available or live in “man camps,” barrack-like buildings.
Ashcraft said there are “help wanted” signs in all the downtown businesses in Williston. He added that he heard there were 15,000 job openings in June and now there are 20,000. Working 20 days on and 10 days off, Ashcraft, like many other commuting locals, comes home to Polson on his days off. His workdays are about 14 and half hours long. Other companies may have shifts of two days on and two off, or 30 on and two off, just depending on the company, according to Ashcraft.
“We’re usually up at 4 a.m. and rolling,” he added.
Long workdays, with sometimes an hour and a half drive to the job site, mean a quick dinner after work, making sandwiches for the next day’s lunch and “hitting the rack,” Ashcraft explained.
The attitude of most workers is “Work me, work me, work me, so I can go home,” he said.
The firm Ashcraft works for bought a racquetball club in Culbertson and will remodel it into a “man camp” for its drivers. Then the plan is to have catered food, he said.
Laundry is problematic. There really is not a place to wash clothes, Ashcraft explained, so he takes enough clothes to cover his working days. He added that he’s heard stories of guys getting up at three in the morning to try to wash their clothes.
There’s talk about a portable washing station too, he noted.
Food cost is not so bad, Ashcraft said, since on his 10 days off he comes home and brings back frozen meat and wild game and keeps it in a cooler. Plus, he said, his wife usually whips him up a casserole. Ice is an issue though since it constantly has to be replaced, but soon winter will be here and the cooler can just go outside his camper door.
With his hours, Ashcraft doesn’t see many folks from Polson, although he does see a lot of Kalispell rigs when he’s driving.
“When you leave in the morning, you drive to the gravel pit. You might not be around a town all day,” he said. Then there’s fuel.
According to Ashcraft, one of the little towns has one station with three pumps, and 4,500 trucks that go by in half an hour, many needing fuel.
He described the frenzy as a crowd of trucks all heading into a station the size of Polson Bay Grocery.
“You just have to wait your turn,” he said, explaining that his company bought its own fuel truck.
Boomtowns are still catching up with all the new work.
“There is something for everybody. If you want to work, it’s there,” Ashcraft said.
