Oil Boom Remakes N. Dakota County With Fastest Growth In U.S.

First came the roughnecks and other oil field workers, almost all men. Lured by steady wages as the nation climbed out of the Great Recession, they filled McKenzie County’s few motel rooms, then began sleeping in cars, tents, trailers — anything to hide from the cold wind cutting across the North Dakota prairie.

Photo Insert: An oil pump in McKenzie County, North Dakota

Once empty dirt roads suddenly were clogged with tanker trucks. Crime rates spiked, Matthew Brown reported for the Associated Press.

Soon everything shifted yet again: The workers’ spouses and children arrived. Classrooms swelled. Apartment buildings cropped up beside oil rigs. And the newcomers made this Northern Plains community their own.

The growth made McKenzie the nation’s fastest-growing county during the past decade, according to the Census Bureau. It swept through like a twisting dust devil, shattering the rural innocence of a region known for inhospitable winters and long summer days perfect for growing crops.

But it also brought youth, diversity, and better wages — breathing new life into somnolent towns that had been losing population since the 1930s.

Dana Amon, who grew up in a double-wide trailer on a farm on the edge of the county seat, Watford City, remembers riding her horse across fields now dotted with tracts of modest housing lit up at night by flares from nearby oil wells.

“Our little town just blew up at the seams,” she said. Since the boom began in 2010, jobs in McKenzie County have come and gone with oil’s changing fortunes.

Crude prices peaked last decade at more than $130 a barrel, fell below $40, then rebounded before falling again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. McKenzie just kept growing.

Watford City — perched on a bluff, its skyline defined by a pair of grain elevators — spilled out onto surrounding farmland. The flat, largely barren landscape of Amon’s childhood now features mile after mile of worker camps, shopping centers, subdivisions, hotels, truck yards, and warehouses.

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