Drill Towns New Wild West: Crime Surges Blamed on Gas Employees
Wheeling Intelligencer
26 October 2011
By Marc Levy
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 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 Sweetwater County, Wyo., where natural gas exploration boomed
about a decade ago, the population increased from 37,600 in 2000
to 43,800 in 2010, and arrests for drunkenness, drugs and DUI more
than doubled from 603 in 2000 to a peak of 1,535 in 2008,
according to state figures.
Since then, the numbers have eased to 1,128 in 2010, a decline
that sheriff's spokesman Detective Dick Blust Jr. credited to the
sluggish national economy.
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.
Sheriff Clinton Walters said his officers are handling about a 25
percent increase from last year in everything from warrants for
people who fail to appear in court to protection-from-abuse
orders. The flood of arrests is such that his office's van is no
longer big enough to transport all the inmates at once from jail
to court, Walters said.
Stories abound about friction between locals and out-of-towners,
whether road rage incidents or fights over women.
Renee Daly, 27, of Montrose, Pa., said she knows of at least three
marriages that ended when local women abandoned their husbands for
gas-field workers.
It's "because of these Southern gentlemen, with their Southern
accents, and the girls move in with these guys to take care of
them," she said. "You get to spend their money, and they're gone
two weeks at a time."