When the rigs came faster than the roofs, workers slept in truck cabs and hastily built lodges, and the oil counties scrambled to house a population that doubled almost overnight.
A drilling boom needs hands, and the hands need somewhere to sleep. When the Bakken roared to life, workers arrived far faster than housing could be built, and for a time the oil counties held a population that had nearly doubled with nowhere to put it. Men slept in truck cabs, in tents, in campers parked wherever a spot could be found.
A Roof Ahead of the Rig
Into the gap came the work camps — rows of modular lodges, mess halls and bunk rooms thrown up on the edge of town to house the crews. Rents in the nearest towns soared to figures that startled the locals, and a plumber or a waitress could suddenly earn oilfield wages simply for being near the play.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Oil-county populations nearly doubled at the height of the boom.
- Modular work camps housed crews the towns could not absorb.
- Rents soared as housing lagged far behind the arriving workforce.
As the boom matured, real houses rose, apartments filled in, and the camps thinned out. The almanac records the housing scramble as one of the boom's hardest lessons — that a rush for what lies underground always outruns the town that must shelter it.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
Produced Water: The Oil Patch's Other Flood
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.