Gas boom brings rise in crime

Associated Press

TOWANDA, Pa.

In a modern-day echo of the raucous Old West, small towns enjoying a boom in oil and gas drilling are seeing a sharp increase in drunken driving, bar fights and other hell- raising, blamed largely on an influx of young men who find themselves with lots of money in their pockets and nothing to do after they get off work.

Authorities in Pennsylvania and other states are quick to point out that the vast majority of workers streaming in are law-abiding. But they also say the drilling industry has brought with it a hard-working, hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble element that, in some places, threatens to overwhelm law enforcement.

Some police departments are trying to hire more officers but are hard-pressed to compete with the industry for applicants.

“On one hand, we need to count our blessings,” said Sheriff Scott Busching of Williams County, N.D. “On the other hand, we need to see if we can control this so it isn’t chickens one day and feathers the next. ... We have come to the point here where we’re almost overwhelmed. It’s very close.”

In Bradford County, Pennsylvania’s most heavily drilled county in the 3-year-old rush to tap the Marcellus Shale, the nation’s largest-known natural-gas reservoir, the stream of men from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and elsewhere has been accompanied by increases in arrests, traffic violations, protection-from-abuse orders and warrants issued for people who don’t show up in court, law- enforcement officials said.

In the heart of western North Dakota’s oil patch, driving under the influence and assaults have spiked after thousands of workers descended on the area and settled in apartments and trailer villages known as “man camps.” Southwestern Wyoming’s booming gas fields also have seen a rise in rowdy behavior.

“We definitely do drink a lot. I ain’t going to lie,” said Jordon Bourque, a 23-year-old pipe inspector from Lafayette, La., who was drinking beer at a bar in the Williamsport, Pa., area one recent night.

But he said that many in the industry obey the law and that authorities in Pennsylvania have less tolerance for troublemakers than police in small-town Texas, where rig workers are used to raising hell and getting a pass from law enforcement.

“You can do that [stuff] and get away with it,” Bourque said. In Pennsylvania, “they look at it totally different.”

Leaving a diner in Towanda in northern Pennsylvania, Jason Phillips, a 30-year-old drilling- equipment supervisor from Coldspring, Texas, said the problem is not really the drilling industry — “it’s young people making a lot of money.” As for himself, he said, “I’m not too much of a wild person.”

The boom in drilling has been made possible by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that cracks open rock layers to free natural gas. Large numbers of workers are needed to operate drilling equipment, drive trucks, handle chemicals, lay pipeline and perform other tasks.

The hours are long. Some employees put in two weeks on, two weeks off. But entry-level laborers or truck drivers can make $40,000 or more, while workers on the drilling rigs can easily pull down twice that.

Their employers often pick up the tab for hotels, meals and practically everything else.

In Pennsylvania’s Bradford County, DUI arrests by state troopers are on track to rise 40 percent this year after climbing 60 percent last year, District Attorney Dan Barrett said.

The number of sentences handed out for criminal offenses was up 35 percent in 2010, he said.