Writing Wednesday: Landscapes of Oil in the Bakken

Over the last week, I’ve chipped away at an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology that provides a concise survey to our work in the Bakken grounded primarily in the published results of our work. This was at the request of peer reviewers who wanted to understand the project more fully and part of a larger slate of revisions.

Here’s what I managed to churn out this past week. Hopefully more today!

Goal of this appendix is to preset a more granular and detailed summary of our work in the Bakken. At the request of several reviewers, we have made an effort to summarize some of our key observations and conclusions from our various publications. When possible, I have made references to the interviews in Appendix I. The following appendix considers workforce housing in the Bakken at three scales: the landscape, the individual camp, and the unit. Our work in the Bakken did not seek to produce a systematic sample much less an exhaustive survey of workforce housing in the region. That said, our regular visits to the region over five years provided an extensive survey of the situation which I try to capture here. The final section in this appendix is comparatively new in that offers some observations on the decline of workforce housing sites as the boom turned to bust.

The landscape of the Bakken boom consists of a regular gird of roads set a 1 mile intervals. Each road provides access to a series of well pads, fracking sites, drilling rigs, and other installations that sit amid canola, sunflower, wheat, and hay fields across the region. The main roads through the Bakken are US Route 2 and US Route 85. A major BNSF rail line parallels Route 2 and provides access to a series of unit yards where workers assemble mile long trains of tank cars filled with Bakken crude. Elsewhere these same rail yards move heavy equipment and fracking propants into the region and help manage the century long flow of grain, canola, soy, and sunflower to markets. Underneath the roads, fields, and rail lines are a network of pipelines which feed tank farms and terminals where crude oil is stored and loaded onto railcars. All these installations required a significant increase in the local workforce as well as specialized workers and teams to drill, frack, and building infrastructure across the region.

Many of these infrastructure projects, such as road and rail improvements and pipeline construction, required a mobile workforce who could easily reach various sites in the region. Drilling, fracking, and well maintenance likewise required distributed labor across the region. In fact, many of the larger “Type 1” camps developed by major logistics companies stood along Route’s 2 and 85 with major clusters near Tioga, Williston, and Watford City. These sites likewise availed themselves to the existing electrical grid, city water supplies, and sometimes even sewage, to convenience ranging from grocery stores to gas stations and health care, and administrative offices often located in the Bakken’s small urban areas. These large, prefabricated facilities, which we will describe in more detail later, earned the official moniker of “man camp” and attracted the attention of various city governments as both solutions to workforce housing needs in the region and as sources of concern owing to their modular and temporary nature.

An interesting node in the landscape was the cluster of workforce housing sites that developed at the intersection of US Route 85 and ND Highway 68 south of the small town of Alexander. This otherwise remote and unpopulated rural intersection saw the development of three workforce housing installations with hundreds of beds around a restaurant called the Bakken buffet. At their height these units would have accommodated nearly 1000 workers making it the second largest settlement in McKenzie County and dwarfing the nearest towns of Alexander (pop. approx. 300) and Arnegard (pop. approx. 260). Along the Route 2 corridor towns with populations approaching 100 (Ross, ND, White Earth, ND and Palermo, ND) attracted temporary housing that exceeded the population of the communities. The abandoned town of Wheelock, as another example, attracted a hodgepodge of temporary housing that momentarily brought the largely abandoned town back to life. Wheelock lacked sewage and municipal water, but a creative landowner developed his own improvised sewage and water system to provide hook ups for a motley assortment of RVs. Our visit to the town suggested that this system was not entirely sealed leaking suspicious smelling water on the muddy paths between the RVs (Caraher and Weber 2017, 83-85; Rothaus et al. 2021; Caraher and Weber 2023, 95). These sites emerged at longstanding nodes in the landscape which were reengaged during the boom.

Workforce housing sites occasionally stood in more remote locations. Upon first entering the Bakken, there were a series of “stackable” mobile housing units near the Enbridge pipeline terminal (Caraher and Weber 2017, 38). These units stood isolated on the far eastern edge of Mountrail County. Presumably the workers here worked on the pipeline terminal and associated unit yard. Along the US 85, south of the Missouri and another large Enbridge pipeline terminal stood a “dry” RV park which offered electrical hookups, but no water or sewage. We had a long conversation with a “fisher” who lived at this site which stood on US 85 but remove from other camps, amenities, or obviously worksites. The fisher worked to extract tools, instruments, and other objects that fell down well holes and traveled across the region (Caraher and Weber 2017, 103). The owner of the land on which the camp stood leased the land to investors who made promises that they ultimately could not keep. Eventually they attempted to sell the land out from under the farmer presumably to recoup their losses (Caraher and Weber 2023, 103-104). The central location of the camp may have benefited him. Two miles west of Alexander, North Dakota stood a remote camp, call The Ponderosa, with over 100 prefabricated trailer units stood on a bustling dirt road (County Road 20) that straddled the Pronghorn, Rugged Butte, Alexander and Rawson oil fields. These more remote sites exemplify the distributed character of labor in the oil fields and the temptation of available land in sometimes isolated locations across the region.

Finally, at various time during the boom there were any number of ad hoc camps that existed in various convenient and semi-public locations ranging from the Williston Walmart parking lot, long a safe haven for RV travelers, to public parks, the back lots of truck repair shops, shelter belts, farm yards, and other places where an RV or even a quiet camping site would not been seen or noticed. The hidden and ephemeral character of these camps made them particularly difficult to identify and document. Moreover, they seem to have been more common in the earliest phases of the boom, before our first field seasons, when more established camps provided better alternatives.