Monday, February 08, 2016
It was boom, now its bust
In the excitement of the North Dakota oil boom, the local economies enjoyed a dizzying flush of people and money into their little towns. Now that the price of oil has dropped to bust levels, the locals are discovering the other end of the cycle.
“You couldn’t find a place,” Brian Resh, 32, said, recalling the busy days one recent morning as he glanced across a nearly empty cafeteria of one of the area’s largest remaining man camps. “Two years ago, you’d drive at night at 3 a.m. and you’d see 300 people.”Too much too soon until there was not enough to sustain it, classic boom and bust.
Now, laid-off oil-field workers are piecing together new jobs, and some have left town. Hotels that were once booked solid for months are about half occupied. Some of the new luxury apartments built to handle the surge of arrivals are dark. Business is down by 40 percent at a new brewery that once had two-hour dinner lines for cowboy-cut rib-eyes and Williston brownies (which come à la mode). And many of the camps built to house an influx of workers, the vast majority of them male, are emptying out like a bar after last call.
It is hardly a bust — unemployment is low, and there are still plenty of help-wanted ads for the area — but the slowdown opens an uncertain second chapter for a place that has spent heavily on new roads, schools, hotels and developments over the past five years.
“We’re overbuilt,” said Marcus Jundt, a businessman who followed the boom to Williston and owns several restaurants here, including the Williston Brewing Company, the place that serves the rib-eyes and brownies. “We have too many hotel rooms, too many apartments, too many restaurants. People are going to go broke. People are going to lose their jobs. It’s going to be painful.”
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