US oil boom has its trade-offs

September 30, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

SIDNEY, Mont.

Politicians are quick to extol the virtues of domestic oil drilling while ignoring the trade-offs.

Here in this fast-developing Western oil patch, the gritty side of America’s new oil boom is on display with rising crime, a slain schoolteacher, rents that have tripled and public resources stretched thin.

That’s just the half of it. Some area high schools are at historic low attendance levels, students dropping out to work the oilfields.

Menial service jobs go unfilled despite high wages, and most everyone worries that the boom is transforming small-town values into something new and unpredictable.

“It’s just happened so fast, and many small communities just didn’t have time to plan,” said Mike Coryell, executive director of the Area Economic Development Council of Miles City, Mont., a town just south of the oil boom that struggles with spillover effects. “The impact’s hit, but you don’t have resources to attack it.”

Deep below the surface of the Earth here are large quantities of crude oil trapped under rock that could make the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil if extracted. The Bakken formation, some 200,000 square miles of it, stretches across North Dakota, Montana, Native American reservations and parts of Canada’s Saskatchewan province.

The area saw a short-lived boom in the 1980s, but technology back then allowed only vertical drilling.

Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling, known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” have unleashed a new boom that many expect to last decades.

Signs of the boom abound. Natural gas is flared in the middle of sugar-beet farms and on prairie ranches that look like the set of old TV Westerns.

Just across the North Dakota line, oil rigs dot a landscape where President Theodore Roosevelt lived out his final years, and where explorers Lewis and Clark famously rendezvoused at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers.

From Miles City, where Coryell struggles to keep pace with growth, it’s almost 50 miles to Sidney, Montana’s oil hub, and roughly 120 miles to Williston, N.D., the heart of the region’s oil boom.

Rents have risen so high in both places that workers now commute there from, and displaced families migrate to, Miles City.

Coryell’s office is helping to secure funding for a new jail.

That’s not the traditional work of economic development officials, but Miles City, like other area small towns, is burdened by rising crime. Parts of its current jail date to 1904.

“We need them to find oil in Custer County, that’s what we need,” said Coryell, referring to the revenues such a strike would bring to towns in the region. “I don’t think people understand the impacts on a rural area, the small towns that are used to having a quiet lifestyle.”

These impacts include sugar-beet farmers on tractors competing for space on tight two-lane highways with rumbling rigs that rush sand, water and heavy machinery to drill sites.

Drunken-driving arrests are way up, and police report seizures of uncommon illicit drugs.

“Heroin is starting to come back. The drug activity has really changed in this region,” said Doug Colombik, the Miles City police chief.

Cops on the beat feel a difference, too.

“The level of aggression that we’re met with when we’re responding [to a call] has really increased,” Mark Kraft, 33, a night officer for the Sidney Police Department, said during ride-along with a McClatchy reporter.

“It makes our job a little more dangerous than it was a couple of years ago,” he said.

The big wakeup call came in early January, when schoolteacher Sherry Arnold went for a morning jog in Sidney and never returned.

Her remains were found months later across the state line near Williston. Police said the 43-year-old cancer survivor was kidnapped and killed.

Two Colorado men who came to the area in search of work in the oilfields are charged in her death.