PICTURES FROM “AMERICA” – Day 29
In which I stay in a man camp.
Williston, North Dakota was until a few years ago a small, pleasant prairie town in the middle of the agricultural heartland. Now it’s a quickly growing boomtown, with new developments every few yards. The two-lane highway into and out of town is being widened to four lanes, but because the construction is still underway the traffic is so thick at midday that it takes 20 minutes to drive 1,500 feet.
Here in Williston and along the roads around it, the roughnecks who work the oil fields live in man camps. The official map of Williston shows where they are by marking them “MC” in red. Some man camps are just rows of trailers; others are more like hotels, which is what the one I’m in now is like. It’s so new, however, that the roads into it are still dirt and gravel. The 150-square-foot room was infested with flies when I arrived and it took several hours to kill them all.
It’s a rainy day, not good for photographing or for being outdoors. I did my best to capture the sense of the place. Big open sky and gently rolling prairie dotted with drill rigs, oil derricks, hayricks, and man camps.
After a rest I went in search of dinner and spotted Doc Holladay’s Roadhouse. A whole bunch of pickup trucks were parked outside, so that looked promising and I pulled in. The tables were full of men in baseball caps, just off their 12- and 18-hour shifts, so I took a seat at the bar. Roughnecks typically work 12 hours a day, six days a week, for two weeks. Then they have two weeks off, when they go home, as far away as Texas.
After I finished my meal, I struck up a conversation with two African men sitting next to me. Samson and Shem are cousins, both from Liberia. There are a lot of Liberians here, Samson said, and when I asked if they were here on work visas, he said no, they’re citizens. They immigrated because of the civil war.
Samson showed me a photo of his wife and three daughters, a beautiful family who live here. His wife grew up in the States but wants to go to Liberia with him when his contract is up in three years. Samson works for Target Logistics, which buys oil at the wellhead and transports it to refineries. He has a management position inspecting the wells and knows all about the chemical contamination they cause. He showed me a photo of himself sitting next to a friend, both in coveralls that covered every inch, including their heads. Samson was clean; his friend was covered in yellow dust.
“Chemicals,” he said.
He told me he didn’t drink the local water. I said I’d drunk some earlier in the day.
“Oh, don’t do that man, please,” he said. “You can light it with your lighter.”
“Try it,” said Shem.
I haven’t got a lighter, or I would. But I trust them.
Samson said a new oil refinery is about to be built near here, in Tioga. I looked it up online and discovered that there are quite a few oil refineries in the area. But the one in Tioga will be huge, according to Samson.
“In ten years, the air and water quality will be terrible,” he said. “The people have no idea what’s coming. But they want it. They asked for it. They want the money. So you can’t blame us.”
He’s right, of course. You can’t blame the men who came to make money in the industry. It’s here, it pays well, what else are they going to do?
Shem is younger, 30 to Samson’s 47. Shem wants to achieve something, but can’t say what exactly. He works for the Lutheran Church, which provides his housing. He’s looking for a way into the oil business. He says that’s the way he’ll achieve. He’s probably right.
The local papers are full of optimistic news about the future of North Dakota. The oil patch is expected to be productive until 2100 and beyond. They’re drilling the Bakken Shale now, and if new technologies continue to be developed, they may be able to drill the six more layers of shale that lie below the Bakken.
Two full pages of the Bakken Breakout Weekly list North Dakota drilling permits issued in a five-day period. Another two-page spread reports “the first real step toward what could be a transformation in coastal states, creating thousands of jobs to support a new energy infrastructure.” The first real step toward that transformation was the Obama administration’s decision to open the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil and gas exploration.
But another story described three recent lightning strikes that set afire arrays of tanks that store brine. Brine is a mixture of water, chemicals, and oil that surfaces after the mixture, pumped at high pressure into the ground, has fractured the shale. The oil industry routinely describes brine as “toxic,” so you know it has to be pretty bad. Storage tanks made of steel would ground lightning, spreading its energy into the earth. But brine corrodes steel, so the industry uses fiberglass tanks. Because fiberglass doesn’t ground lightning, the tanks heat up and explode, spreading toxic brine far and wide.
I read a piece on women in the workforce, featuring 24-year-old Anneli Anderson, whose “sun-kissed looks belie her tenacity and spunk.” She walks up to ten miles a day marking gas lines with yellow flags. According to the Oil Patch Dispatch, she loves the outdoors and “insists it’s all about ‘fun.’”
PHOTOS:
1. Traffic into Williston
2. My man camp
3. View from my man camp
4. Another man camp
5. Drill rig, oil derrick, hayricks
6. Samson (l) and Shem (r)
7. Shem
8. Brine storage tanks
9. Bridal shop window, downtown Williston
