Just before
dawn on a mid-December day, the white lights of a drill rig
illuminate low clouds. Roughnecks mill around restlessly in their
insulated coveralls and work boots while their supervisor gives his
safety speech. Today, they’ll drill yet another natural gas
well into the rich Piceance Basin.
The 20 men on this
crew come from places like Tennessee, Louisi-ana and Wyoming for
lucrative jobs in the gas fields. They will spend the next two
weeks working 12-hour days on Patterson drill rig 171, take a
two-week break, then return for another stint in EnCana Oil &
Gas’ 45,000-acre field. Half the crew covers the night shift,
the other half, the day. At the end of the day, the commute is
short: The entire crew lives in a two-story manufactured home that
travels with the drill rig.
Dozens of these “man
camps” are scattered throughout the area, housing hundreds of
workers. And more are coming: As houses, apartments and hotels fill
up with the energy boom’s workers, the industry has turned to
these self-contained, mobile housing units. Although sometimes
inconvenient, they provide a partial solution to a housing problem
spiraling out of control.
“We got to a point where
nothing was available,” says Robert Samples, drilling
supervisor for EnCana. His company turned to man camps a year ago,
when housing all but disappeared for the growing army of gas
workers.
Six to a room
Even before
gas rigs loomed over western Colorado’s Garfield County, the
area felt growing pains. As working-class people were priced out of
Aspen, Vail and nearby towns, they moved down valley to towns like
Rifle, Silt and Parachute. The population of Garfield County, with
its 60-mile commuters and influx of baby-boomer retirees, is set to
double over the next 30 years.
Add the crush of oil and
gas workers in the Piceance Basin, one of the most heavily drilled
fields in the country. A county study predicts Rifle, a town of
8,100, will balloon to nearly 44,000 by 2030. The town’s
vacancy rate has shrunk to 1 percent. Single-family homes list for
over $275,000, up about $80,000 from just a year ago. Rentals are
almost nonexistent, and hotels, once full only during hunting
season, are booked year-round by gas workers. The situation is so
tight that roughnecks working different shifts sometimes alternate
sleeping shifts in the same bed.
“I didn’t
know it was going to be this hard to find a place to live,”
says Jorge Leo, 31, who came from Farmington, N.M., to build
pipelines for the industry. He and his wife, Wanda, share a double
room at the Red River Inn in Rifle with their four children, ages 4
to 11. Daughter Lexis sleeps with her parents. Jorge and Daniel
share the other bed, and Mercedes sleeps on a rollaway cot between
them. They cook meals on an electric skillet, wash dishes in the
bathroom sink and stow their clothes in suitcases, waiting, as they
have for six months, to find an apartment.
“A
motel,” Wanda Leo says, “is no way to raise your
children.”
It all looks familiar to Rifle Mayor
Keith Lambert. “When I first came here in ’81,”
he says, “housing was such that there were people living
under bridges and culverts, tents and campers. There was no place
to live.” That was during the region’s last energy
boom, when high petroleum prices fueled a bonanza in efforts to
extract fuel from oil shale deposits. Then came Black Sunday
— May 2, 1982 — when Exxon laid off 2,200 workers from
its Parachute plant. Western Colorado’s economy plummeted.
Towns like Rifle emptied.
At an arm’s
length
Man camps, often far from town — one EnCana
site is reachable only by helicopter — not only provide
housing, but also help keep other problems at bay.
“We’ve had advice from certain communities that they
don’t want certain people in town,” says Jill Davis,
spokeswoman for Shell’s Mahogany oil shale research facility,
which houses some 125 workers.
Gas workers have helped
double Rifle’s sales tax revenue during the past three years.
They have also contributed to a double-digit rise in crime.
“It’s not like an old hick town anymore,” says
Melissa Sparkman, bartender at the Sports Corner Saloon, where the
crowd has gotten bigger but rowdier and the list of
“86’d” patrons has doubled. “In some ways
it’s good. In a lot of ways it’s bad.” For
workers spending long days on the rigs, temporary housing close to
the job could prove safer for everyone, says Garfield County senior
planner Fred Jarman. Workers are less likely to carouse in town,
and man camps make it easier to control alcohol and drug abuse, a
problem that has plagued the industry. “We can go over and
look a guy in the eyeballs and see where he’s been, where
he’s slept, what he’s been up to,” says Samples,
the drilling supervisor. Sleeping yards from the rigs, he says,
workers are more productive and build an esprit de corps.
“You’re with them 24 hours a day. You can’t work
if you’re not thinking and acting as a family,” says
Danny Rios, 30, of Greeley, Colo. A toolpusher, or rig manager,
Rios just returned from San Jose, Calif., where he proposed to his
girlfriend. Fortunately, she’s become accustomed to his
back-and-forth lifestyle, he says.
And the accommodations
aren’t so bad. At the EnCana camp, caterers serve up steak,
crab and gumbo, wash the workers’ clothes and clean their
rooms. Workers share a satellite TV and a computer, and they have
free phone calls home.
“If you’re a roughneck
out here working and you’re away from home, it appeals to
you,” says Dale Hunt, a supervisor on the Patterson rig. In
an area where housing becomes scarcer every day, it’s often
the only option.
The author writes from
Carbondale, Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Man Camp.
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